Talk:2021-09-25 Livestream

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Raw transcript

• 0:05

[Music]

• 0:20

hello everyone and welcome to our september development update hopefully

• 0:26

all of you have been having a glorious month as we definitely have been

• 0:32

you know at the grind getting a lot of things done and we're going to show off some of that right here we have quite a

• 0:37

few videos to share with you as well as you know our normal you know updates from all of our teams but just to kind

• 0:43

of go over everything if you haven't tuned in with us before um i'm margaret crone i am our community marketing lead

• 0:49

and i'm with our one and only stephen sharif our creative director how are you doing hello

• 0:55

i am doing very good it's been a busy morning uh had some recording that we're

• 1:01

going to show just a little bit of recording a little later um but the week's been great last night i had a really fun time with

• 1:08

um some of our colleagues and and friends playing a uh a star wars little

• 1:13

like uh table top rpg campaign thing fight the death star because what was happening we did fight the

• 1:19

death star uh but unfortunately um yavin iv uh suffered an unfortunate fate and

• 1:26

uh i was the last one killed though to be fair i was in a b-wing uh but i was the last one destroyed you know if

• 1:33

you don't if you don't survive then it doesn't really matter yeah that's true that

• 1:38

is my pilot being last today the ship the ship was destroyed but my pilot made it so it was okay

• 1:46

okay well your pilot survived yeah he survived i got to roll on the like because i was in a home system or

• 1:52

whatever so there were like other little rebel like people trying to evacuate and they picked me up on the way out of the system oh

• 1:58

well i'm sad that you didn't survive but you know what it's okay but because you're surviving this and

• 2:04

this is what really matters yeah real life um but yeah we've been having a lot of fun uh doing a lot of and even other

• 2:11

gaming with our with our fellow co-workers especially now that we're all in the office we're doing like a magic the gathering tournament

• 2:17

oh margaret's been kicking some butt i have not i've lost

• 2:23

you've lost all your rounds too i know we were playing some magic tournaments here's the thing though two

• 2:28

of my matches like i was so close one of them i would have probably won actually if i wasn't an idiot and read michael they

• 2:34

were all cheating with you anyways they were doing like free mulligans and you didn't get any free mulligans so you know yeah it's okay we'll we'll

• 2:42

survive it's been fun though i've i've liked uh hanging out with people and you know playing games with everybody um and

• 2:49

you know there are some other games that are on the horizon that we're making little guilds for that we're playing uh

• 2:54

because you know some games are having updates and others are launching but you know we like playing games just as much as we

• 3:00

like making them so let's talk about making hard play hard exactly let's talk about making games when we're not what

• 3:06

we're doing when we're not you know hanging out and playing games so uh we're gonna

• 3:11

go over some reminders we have some studio updates we have a design and engineering update a lot of videos from them with some cool stuff

• 3:18

one of the things that i mentioned last stream we'll let you guys guess what that might have been that i was talking about last

• 3:23

stream but we're actually going to show it here on the live stream and then we have environment art and character art as well that we'll be

• 3:29

doing and then we have some q a so you guys submitted some questions we're going to answer probably roughly 10 10

• 3:35

of them but if we have extra time we may answer a few extra um but first and foremost let's go over

Intro & Reminders

• 3:40

some reminders first and foremost guess who's going to be starring on on a show steven sharif

• 3:48

uh we are gonna stephen is going to be joining the discussion around the Ashes of Creation discussion round over on

• 3:55

twitch.tv bc giant which you can go check out on september 26th which is this sunday at noon pacific so

• 4:02

definitely go check that out i think they have a um on the reddit you can submit some

• 4:09

questions still so if you want to submit questions pop on over and put them over there and uh you know maybe stephen will

• 4:15

answer your question on the on the live stream yeah that'll be fun

• 4:21

yeah and that's their 100th episode so it's a little bit of a fun celebration as well

• 4:26

next up we've got some cool things from our community we just wanted to do like an extra shout out to you guys thank you so much for

• 4:33

putting that lovely letter together we really appreciate it it was oh that was awesome that was so awesome and the dev

• 4:39

team loved it the team loved it um and that's that's the good like

• 4:45

heart and feely stuff that definitely is the biggest motivator for any developer to read from a community

• 4:52

when you know you you go through what is a lot of endless hours of work and putting

• 4:59

together a milestone for the development right and you get to read the

• 5:04

response from the community and this was such i mean it was a very comprehensive um uh it was very comprehensive and the

• 5:11

little doodles and stuff or so yes i love those those are great some of them were creatures from our game too i loved

• 5:18

it yeah that was pretty cool it was very cool big hearts from the dev team to every one of you guys for for

• 5:25

being such an awesome community and so supportive and it it really makes this process such an enjoyable and easy one

• 5:32

to to pour your heart into because you have such an awesome community behind you yeah i had happy tears

• 5:40

um and of course we have our reminder that our cosmetics are going to be swapping over the coliseums

• 5:47

favored we'll be swapping over on october 6 uh 2021 at 11am pacific and

• 5:53

you can check those out over on our shop as well as on our news article that has some lore bits which i'm sure all of our

• 6:00

work friends out there are interested in reading um so snag it while it's hot because the next set's coming in and i

• 6:07

like the little snail yeah that thing's so cute look at its little legs people

• 6:13

are obsessed now you know what i got a lot of hate for the snail with legs now

• 6:18

you all like it you all are into it yeah i like the little gimpy legs they're cool

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and there's there's a reason they have legs man guess what's in the water if these snails are that big and they have

• 6:30

long legs guess what's in the water and why they evolved to have legs that's the real question you should be asking yourself

• 6:36

um beyond that we have uh i guess um some more dev discussions to

• 6:42

chat with you guys about and so with that um we asked you this month actually two questions for dub discussion one was

• 6:49

how much time do you typically spend on character creation and what are the tools you like to have available when

• 6:54

you're building your character do you focus on race and class synergy looking good or something else entirely and you

• 7:01

all have sent some wonderful feedback for us we've been compiling that as well as

• 7:06

you can continue to send us feedback we'll keep looking over at anything new that's added in additions so please feel

• 7:12

free to do i will say that there is some exciting stuff on the on the

• 7:18

development front for the character creator i sat through an hour and a half long uh

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dissertation uh from my engineering team presented by adam clayton and zach uh on the

• 7:32

endeavors and objectives for the the character creator and the tech that's going to be created for it uh and the

• 7:39

tools for the for the character team um and it it does look pretty good i

• 7:44

don't think i've seen one this is a common comment from the engineering team was

• 7:50

i don't think we've ever seen this elaborate of a character creator in an mmo before so i think it's going to be

• 7:56

something pretty cool to share with the community when it's ready yeah and like we've said in the past if you're kind of new here and you don't know how that

• 8:02

stuff is going to work we are going to have the character creator be available before launch so people can kind of create their characters take your time

• 8:08

we understand that when it comes to like launching a product you on launch day you want to be just as competitive as

• 8:13

everyone else so you don't want to spend the hour time creating your character so we're going to give that to you a little

• 8:19

earlier in advance so you can save your character and be able to like quickly utilize that template as you make your

• 8:24

character going forward when we launch see i know my engineers by the way are listening especially those that

• 8:29

presented in that in the character crater meeting so i've just set the bar high for you [Laughter]

• 8:38

and then we still have some other ones we had actually a bonus question for you all because the design

• 8:44

team was having a discussion and they wanted this answer really quickly so we kind of swapped it in and added it as a

• 8:50

secondary quick one in here which is do you like to see larger variants in progression speed between different

• 8:56

leveling activities examples questing grinding mobs or do you prefer a more homogenized

• 9:03

progression across different leveling activities and how do you feel about progression speed generally and you guys

• 9:08

have been submitting tons of feedback on that we really appreciate it and especially as that one was kind of

• 9:14

like a quick toss in we do have some more discussions coming up as per usual we're

• 9:20

still in development so we still have a lot of things to ask you all so this next one is actually going to be

• 9:25

about character inspection so keep this in mind for your october thinking cap because we have a lot of um

• 9:33

things that we're working on for character i think that was one that i had asked designed to send off to

• 9:39

community as like an emergency question to the community yeah so we basically moved the

• 9:45

october one to november we basically pushed everything down and moved this one to the october one for you to get it in quickly um yes

• 9:53

sweet your feedback gets used so please please please submit it uh we want to make sure that we're on the same page uh

• 9:59

like we've said in the past you know a lot of the times when we get these reports from your feedback

• 10:05

most of the time it aligns with everything that we are pretty much on the same page about but in other cases sometimes you guys

• 10:11

add a little bit of addition for us and we're like okay we can see how we can integrate those things into our designs

• 10:17

absolutely definitely go and participate in that in those discussions because the

• 10:22

the commentary you leave as a community is the sword and shield in certain

• 10:27

design discussions for designers on either side of an argument so it's nice to have the player feedback

• 10:34

and and experiences being able to be leveraged in the design room when we discuss stuff

• 10:41

all right and of course we have even more as you know this year we've added in a

• 10:47

lot of guild gathering discussions because we are specifically focusing in on a lot of guild system stuff uh you

• 10:53

know guilds are very important when it comes to mmorpgs they're one of the reasons why people stay and you know keep playing the game we make long

• 11:00

lasting friendships so definitely your feedback is important this time we asked you if you had a phone app that

• 11:05

integrated with your guild what sorts of things would you want from it or think would be useful and you guys have

• 11:11

provided a lot of great ideas things that i think we're already pretty much most of the stuff i saw on the list were

• 11:16

things that we're already planning or thinking about doing so keep submitting feedback if you have other additional

• 11:21

ideas definitely toss those over our way and in october we'll be chatting with you all about management tools which i

• 11:29

think are something that when i play a lot of mmorpgs they're in some some games have good management tools

• 11:36

others don't but i think there's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to management tools i don't think there's a game out there that's kind of doing

• 11:42

everything that people need i see a lot of people using like third party or mod mods for that

• 11:49

all right yeah as a as a guild leader like if i had an app that i could interface with

• 11:55

you know to communicate with my excuse me as a former guild leader to communicate with my um guild i'd want

• 12:01

the like ability to activate their speaker phone remotely without their permission like they give the commission

• 12:07

no no i'm just saying i'm just saying they give them permission when they join i tell them this is a prerequisite to join in the guild and

• 12:13

then when they're not at a rate i could just start screaming at them like i don't know they're at dinner or something i'm like you need to get your

• 12:20

butt back to the computer we have a dragon to kill you're supposed to be here an hour ago like that is you know

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what i think most guild leaders want i mean kind of yes because when someone

• 12:32

doesn't show up you're like especially when they have an important role like they're your main tank or one of your main healers it is definitely stressful

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i i i'm sure that if that was a feature allowed like you gave permission to the app to do that a lot of guilds would use

• 12:46

something along those lines would want to i don't think everyone would be okay with them doing that or just like

• 12:51

forcibly activate the like um uh the video you know the camera so that

• 12:58

you can like see what they're doing no

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i'm just kidding i'm just kidding on that one maybe a little bit no i don't know we'll see

• 13:11

oh no oh my goodness well that might violate do you follow along those lines of what stephen wants or are

• 13:18

you more interested in not having that i personally like my privacy um i think that you know a calendar notifications

• 13:25

and pop-ups are enough for me i don't need that much control um maybe you are more the

• 13:31

control freak than i am i like how somebody said you act like daddy bezos isn't doing this already

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that's true i was like they're already doing something with their phones that's not true we as a company do not endorse or

• 13:44

believe that i'm just kidding i mean i meant it's true that like your phones pretty much record everything

• 13:51

all right let's move on to our next thing here which is uh content creator stuff we are

• 13:56

still continuing to take applications so if you're interested and you are a content creator you know the main thing

• 14:02

for us here is consistency and quality of content so apply to the program we are not accepting anyone into the

• 14:08

program quite yet uh because we are still in our second round of interviews i've been interviewing quite a few

• 14:13

people looking at a lot of resumes haven't quite found that perfect person for us and like we said you know our

• 14:19

main goal is to hire people that we really feel are perfect for our teams and you know are going to make a solid

• 14:25

you know intrepid family member that we have here for a long for long lasting times um and with that once we do hire

• 14:32

that person on we will be bringing on our training program and sending out invites for folks and then also if you

• 14:38

aren't invited to the program or the training program you will get a message anyway that telling you why so that you can work on

• 14:45

you know doing things to improve it so that you can be able to reapply at a later date um but yes that is that the

• 14:52

only other thing that i have for you all is web update stuff if you've been keeping an eye on everything we did have

• 14:58

a small down time during this month it was specifically to fix some bugs those bugs have been resolved it looks like

• 15:04

everything is going smoothly uh the primary one that people had concerns about were folks who were in

• 15:10

europe who are having trouble purchasing but hopefully that has been resolved for you um we also are working on in the

• 15:17

back end i think i've talked a little bit about this last month but there's because this is such an important

• 15:23

back-end thing um it's going to take us a little bit more time to do which is some more sso integration and work on

• 15:30

that end as well as 2fa and more security like general security things that we're trying to work on in order to

• 15:36

make you know get better for you all and of course we are still working on support designs

• 15:42

they're kind of wrapping up that stuff um they're working on the mobile version of the support page and then um we'll be

• 15:48

moving forward with the production process of that but that is what's going on for our

• 15:54

reminders next up let's hand it over to steven to talk about our studio updates

Studio Update

• 16:01

i feel like i had a lot of reminders today so that was a lot of reminders holy smokes and we'll see you next month

• 16:09

um a studio update things are going very good for at the studio uh we have the last of our equipment and furniture

• 16:17

ancillary things being installed as of next week i think it arrives on monday

• 16:23

and should be installed by friday of everything we have about i would say 80 percent of the team is in

• 16:28

the studio at this stage um we've gotten some of the appliances in we've had some great hires over the past

• 16:36

a few weeks since our last stream including one that i guess got

• 16:42

picked up by a couple of news outlets one of the senior narrative designers for intrepid

• 16:48

as a gentleman by the name of wynn mclaughlin we're very happy to have him um joining the studio he was the former

• 16:55

lead writer for elder scrolls online which i thought did a you know great job i loved that

• 17:01

game's narrative and stories i thought that was one of their strongest points but also he worked on

• 17:06

you know sotor and tabula rasa and other great games he has a very distinguished background within the industry and is a

• 17:13

very talented individual so we're happy to to have him join the team we also have some other great individuals who've

• 17:19

joined um over the last month as well so some of these key positions are getting filled we've had

• 17:24

really a lot of again you know we kind of had this retrospective last month over alpha one a lot of the different

• 17:30

departments had opportunities to kind of speak and get into meetings and huddles about you know things that we've we've

• 17:36

learned and that we have you know want to change from this standpoint um different development

• 17:42

directions that we're taking uh you know i've been very heavily a part of daily you know

• 17:47

four or five hour long sessions with our design team every day of the week

• 17:52

i'm sure it's been exhausting for everybody those meetings are intense it's like going over everything it's a

• 17:58

lot of back and forth it's yeah sometimes a little bit of a battle of you know ideas

• 18:04

absolutely i love personally i i i like to when i can sit back and just listen to

• 18:10

the battle occur you know what i mean because it is i think there's a lot of valid ideas and and you know changes

• 18:17

that want to be implemented um but it's good to have that opportunity to kind of after a big milestone like alpha one to

• 18:23

take the time go through and actually evaluate what we learned what we saw the things we want to change you know what

• 18:29

what came off from paper to to practice and and how that transition actually you

• 18:34

know affected the systems and designs that we have um so from that perspective you know

• 18:40

everything everything's going pretty good right now i think we're in a very nice place as a studio um i i also want

• 18:45

to say that on the retrospective front it was so nice um one of the producers messaged me was like dude community team

• 18:51

got a lot of love and i think that i haven't worked at a lot of companies where people really appreciate the

• 18:56

community teams so it's been really nice to have a team of people who really understand like what we do on our end um

• 19:03

because you know it's a lot that we try to keep up with on the communication front back and

• 19:08

forth between the players and the developers in order for them just to focus on their work um so that we can get all the answers to you guys too um

• 19:15

and you know if there's ever anything that you think we need to improve you guys know how to find me i'm margaret crone message me i'll

• 19:21

i'll make some changes um so yeah a lot of love it's been awesome

• 19:27

yeah yeah all right moving on to design oh we got a lot of cool stuff here i

• 19:34

think you wanted to show off a video of you kind of showing some amounts first

Design Update Start

• 19:39

yeah i'll do just a just a quick introduction to the video obviously it's a short video um you know

• 19:45

we over the past several months showed lots of in-game footage of different systems and stuff that we're just in

• 19:50

alpha one at this current moment in time you know a lot of stuff is being torn down and from the build's perspective

• 19:57

and the development branch you know a lot of things are getting reworked redone and that of course is going to

• 20:02

introduce a significant amount of bugs because as particular systems and or data changes

• 20:08

that has a cascading effect across you know many things that interact with that with that data so um

• 20:15

this is just going to be just a brief kind of look at some of the new a new armor set that got implemented in the

• 20:20

game a couple of the mounts and and just um you know quick five minutes of that so nothing too crazy and we have more

• 20:27

videos so this isn't these we have some more like developments

• 20:32

all right well we'll see you all in about five minutes

In-game Footage - Costume and Mount Showcase

• 20:38

welcome glorious Ashes of Creation community to another

• 20:44

live stream friday welcome you back to the world of

• 20:49

where it has been some time since this planet has seen adventures

• 20:57

it is still under construction we're hard at work changing

• 21:02

many of the things but i wanted to show you some

• 21:09

new stuff that has been added recently

• 21:15

including this glorious set of armor many of you may recognize it

• 21:21

this is the armor magistrate might wear

• 21:28

but as you can see the lands are barren

• 21:33

there are no players present i can't take you to some of the under

• 21:39

construction zones for they are not ready for mortal eyes yet

• 21:46

but i can show you some new mounts

• 21:52

um which one should i show first do we want something

• 22:00

not living i guess technically they're both not living we have two mouths to show you

• 22:06

both living let's just go randomly with

• 22:14

a flying geode

• 22:19

so as you can tell this guy is a little bit different um he is definitely a little twitchy and

• 22:26

he's got some uh dangling what appears to be vines that are kind

• 22:31

of sticking out of him why a geode would have vines your guess is as good as mine

• 22:38

but this guy you know what he reminds me of a little bit

• 22:44

when he flies you'll you'll you'll guess what he reminds me of when he flies you're ready

• 22:51

oh he's walking oh i'm sorry wait we're in walk mode

• 22:57

this is his like if he's walking kind of thing look at how my guy's trying to

• 23:02

like be stable on top he's like oh i don't know i don't know about this

• 23:08

all right let's actually fly

• 23:14

look at him move i love his little little tentacles

• 23:22

this guy's pretty cool here's a little jump

• 23:29

obviously uh there still needs to be some some polish here but

• 23:35

as you can see the little geodude is a fun one he's different than your normal mount

• 23:43

all right next up we have

• 23:52

another non-living creature

• 23:59

prepare yourselves

• 24:06

now who knows which one this is

• 24:12

this is the ebbing

• 24:18

[Music]

• 24:29

[Music] all right wait let me let me get a good spot where i can

• 24:35

now he still has some uh visual effects work that is not done yet for him

• 24:43

such as the glowy bits and pieces of his body as you can see

• 24:50

he is a little bit decomposing he is an exposed like rib

• 24:58

cage that doesn't look like you know he might want to get that

• 25:03

checked out this doesn't look good for him

• 25:09

you know it's probably an infection that could take hold at this point

• 25:15

but uh this guy's pretty cool i like him

• 25:22

oh he looks great but as you can see uh in addition to

• 25:27

you know what we're doing working towards alpha 2 a lot of new assets will be coming online

• 25:33

that we're going to be showing as the character environment and animation teams concept crew

• 25:41

get running through all of the master asset list that vera has

• 25:47

to build this world up um

• 25:52

i know that we've been talking a little bit about you know what

• 25:58

we're working towards with alpha 2 but there's a very large and substantial

• 26:04

pieces of the game that are intending to be finished by alpha 2. still a lot of testing we have to do in

• 26:09

between now and then and we'll be talking more on the stream about the tools that design's using

• 26:17

the optimizations that engineering are making and

• 26:22

all the awesome assets of course as always that our teams are making but with every day that passes

• 26:29

vera comes to life

• 26:35

all right see you back on stream all right

• 26:41

i see everyone seems to really like uh the glimmering geode and something okay now what did the geode look i'm not

• 26:47

gonna say it but what was it looking like when it flew it totally gave me

• 26:54

yeah exactly i was like wait this looks a little bit like that okay it's cool though i know i i like

• 27:01

the geode i think it's i think it's cool to have unique mounts that

• 27:07

you know skirt the what normalcy is for mmos i think it's

• 27:12

kind of a jellyfish mount too so using that same similar body type so if you

• 27:18

guys got that cosmetic you'll like that we'll have more in-game ones that you you can achieve too but you know just a

• 27:23

little teaser of some cool stuff that's coming along the lines um but beyond that let's get into kind of what other

• 27:30

things the design team is working on and um we have some videos to showcase in regards to some of that yeah

• 27:37

so moving it a little bit in that direction um you know the design team obviously as

• 27:42

i said previously has been kind of taking into account to a lot of the information we collected from alpha one and we've been kind of going through the

• 27:49

different design documentation that we have um and and including some changes that we would like to see as a result of

• 27:55

alpha one and the in the insights that we gleaned from that um one of the things that we'll show and

Node Simulation

• 28:01

we'll just kind of have it as an as a side but before we get into it um i want to explain like you know now as we're

• 28:06

moving out of alpha 1 and into alpha 2 and we're trying taking into account the

• 28:13

synergy between the nodes across the entire world right and having over a hundred nodes intended for

• 28:20

for the for Ashes of Creation at launch um we're starting to to set up a little bit

• 28:26

more definitions between those interactions the types of alliances that can form the types of trades route trade

• 28:31

routes that can be present what sieges excuse me what the effects of sieges

• 28:37

will have when nodes get taken down how these nodes will

• 28:43

take over territory and adopt um you know the parent relationship and vassal

• 28:49

relationship with other nearby nodes um and this is a a very com this is

• 28:54

probably the most complex nature of how nodes exist with

• 29:00

one another is that expansion component that vassal parent relationship the the

• 29:07

diplomacy and a few of the designers have been working together to kind of you know uh

• 29:14

you know in the past we kind of put together like little little mock board games and stuff like that to kind of

• 29:19

play out scenarios um but we actually uh now have a visual representation um

• 29:27

from a program perspective that we can actually simulate um what these types of

• 29:33

progression is going to look like in the world of era using the ferret map and you know i'm not going to say don't

• 29:40

look into this video and think that you can gleam the specific locations of these nodes because they're not um that's the these

• 29:47

are this is not an accurate representation of the location of specific nodes well you know people are going to hard

• 29:54

on this they're gonna like be going into every little detail this is like throwing a literal barrel of gasoline on

• 30:00

any of the of the community that likes to theorycraft behind the node placement and system and all that kind of stuff

• 30:05

but one of our one of our designers bucky collins did a great job in kind of setting this up and um

• 30:12

you know kind of we can show it now if we want to yeah this is what i was talking about last month by the way was this video

• 30:21

oh nice yeah what's that there we go

• 30:26

so here here you can see you know that this is now you can you can augment the

• 30:34

tick rate on this right to kind of show passage of time and you can show the initial territories on the varan map of

• 30:41

what these particular nodes have governance over or their zones of influence as we like to call them right

• 30:48

and as nodes you know as the simulation of this begins to

• 30:55

advance and nodes begin to expand their territory and they begin to um take over nearby nodes as a result of

• 31:01

their of their growth you start to see these power level these ratings um that

• 31:08

are applied here on on specific nodes and that determines

• 31:13

what type of takeover power it has and and what it uh pushes back against um

• 31:20

for other nodes that are looking to take over new territory as they advance so this also simulates uh sieges it also

• 31:27

simulates events so each of these nodes will have a health ticker when that health ticker is impacted it'll stop

• 31:33

gaining power or gaining or slow down in its gaining of experience and that's because certain events can

• 31:41

affect a node by disabling certain services disabling buildings players don't respond to that horde of zombies

• 31:47

that have you know come out of the out of the nearby ravine um then those

• 31:53

zombies can attack stables they can attack service buildings and and and prevent uh particular types of quests or

• 32:02

activities and services from from happening until it's repaired right so

• 32:07

it simulates that it simulates the sieges if a particular node has a has a certain frequency

• 32:13

that's set where we want to see randomization of how nodes get affected by sieges

• 32:20

sometimes they'll be destroyed in the simulation sometimes they'll be have disabled services again similar to

• 32:26

an event because they didn't succeed necessarily at sieging the node but they did succeed at disabling some of the

• 32:31

buildings as part of that siege so a lot of these this representation does show 111 nodes as part of the as part of

• 32:39

this particular simulation i'm not sure what the tick frequency is on this video um it might be something

• 32:45

on the magnitude of like every second is um you know probably 12 to 24 hours

• 32:52

um so over time you know you start seeing these larger

• 32:59

node systems building up to eventually where you might see you know cities and metropolises after some period of time

• 33:06

and what this does you know what this allows uh the design team to to kind of

• 33:12

do from a tools perspective as they simulate this this idea of how the world is going to progress is it gives an opportunity to

• 33:19

kind of see strange happenings or something that we couldn't necessarily predict

• 33:24

but was a a possible outcome based on the variables present that players could potentially simulate

• 33:31

or excuse me it simulates what players could potentially do as well when the game goes live and that might include things like

• 33:37

splitting up a particular zone of influence across a waterway right having having your

• 33:43

territory expand out to an island or across continents um you know these are these are the types

• 33:49

of things that we want to see players do eventually obviously but this this tool provides the design team

• 33:55

the opportunity to see it repetitively and over a fast period of time so they see these different types

• 34:02

of outcomes the the chat is excited and they

• 34:08

they are concerned that we're sharing too much information publicly oh no no no no that's okay don't don't worry

• 34:14

about that there's a there's a whole side panel here that actually you can't see that i

• 34:20

asked margaret this morning to yeah i was like how am i gonna hide yeah and uh you know the side panel has

• 34:26

a lot of data points that are collected and the weighted values of these particular data points that that nodes

• 34:32

can exhibit through you know development through player activity through you know whatever um and again these locations

• 34:40

aren't the locations of the particular nodes but they do show what that interaction what that what

• 34:45

that almost territory-like um um you know politicking will be between

• 34:52

nodes the persistence and how it will evolve over time which i'm very excited about i've played

• 34:58

there's only a few games that have that kind of persistence over long periods of time um but all of them have been really

• 35:05

fun so i'm excited to see it come to fruition especially in an mmrpg where you know like

• 35:10

i don't know especially when you can have your own space in your own house and your own freehold um it's going to be exciting to see what players do and

• 35:17

how each of the servers does different things too because oh yeah your guys's actions on different like there's

• 35:23

maybe like a 0.01 chance that two servers could have the same situation but very unlikely right

• 35:31

yeah absolutely um you know obviously as we've spoken about many times since the

• 35:37

inception of of ashes and the node system is the cool component of having different

• 35:42

servers experience different things the way that content is gated behind world development is also an interesting

• 35:49

method by which this content gets trickled out to the player base based on their you know decisions essentially

• 35:56

and how that affects the story overall right that's that's the big appeal to ash is that's what we are doing

• 36:02

differently than a lot of mmos you know that have come before us um and you know what that means is we

• 36:08

have to create an abnormally larger amount of curated content so that those decisions from the player

• 36:15

mean something um and just aren't you know obfuscated behind the

• 36:20

player-driven you know um quote-unquote terminology um

• 36:26

you want to have complementary curated uh content that that exists and makes the world feel

• 36:32

reactionary to the players um you know a hard thing to achieve

• 36:39

i think that i was even having a chat with some of the other designers about that and like how quests are going to

• 36:44

work and how those systems are going to be integrated into the node system it's very intriguing um and a lot of

• 36:50

discussion design just had a three-hour meeting yesterday on quest and uh and you know what we what we took

• 36:57

out of alpha one and obviously you know the outstanding feature work that wasn't completed by alpha one but you know

• 37:04

doubling down on those designs and providing that as the goal for alpha 2 is to

• 37:11

actually implement that more modular reactionary type um questing systems that

• 37:18

you know are less about go do x you know a b and c and come back and and chat with me and more about how like when

• 37:25

you're on that path and the world is actively developing you know how that changes what your objectives are what

• 37:31

your destination is what the you know adversary something and you're like oh i interact with this crate and

• 37:36

now like oh i have the option to either take this to who it belongs to because it does have a label on it or i can just

• 37:42

take it for myself but if someone catches me trying to sell it or something maybe there's reactions right like those kind of makes you actually

• 37:54

you know everyone everyone has their own path that they might take but i think that's very exciting and obviously this is the thing that i was talking about

• 38:00

last month that i thought was really cool and he's made some adjustments to it too which i think is just really it's great

• 38:07

to see and uh probably helps design a lot in regards to it oh yeah absolutely yeah i mean the design team has been

• 38:13

doing a great job um and and honestly like

• 38:19

one of the things i love about you know working with designers as opposed to engineers or artists is that like you

• 38:25

know they're constantly thinking all the alternate ways exactly all the

• 38:31

all the alternate ways at which these intents diverge you know and what directions

• 38:38

they could potentially go and and how you know you want to engage with the

• 38:43

player not just on the fundamental idea of immersion but from a mechanical standpoint you know what are the ways

• 38:50

players are going to game the system because we're players ourselves and how can we account for those potential gamings of the systems you know stephen

• 38:56

will game the system well i mean i think that's a very important aspect whenever you're

• 39:02

discussing system design is you know if you have that experience and you're a gamer and your mind works that way

• 39:08

that's good because you already have a leg up on your on your community in the sense that you can predict certain

• 39:14

things now obviously you can't not everything man obviously you cannot predict everything

• 39:21

but um you know if you can go through and identify a lot of this stuff as part of

• 39:27

your design work that's a super important thing and so as you all know nodes are kind of the core heart of

• 39:33

everything like almost every system touches it so it's very important for us to solidify everything make sure that

• 39:39

you know everything's kind of going in the direction that they want a lot of the stuff that you have probably experienced during alpha was data

• 39:46

collection and seeing how that process works and how they integrate with our quests coming online uh new nodes

• 39:53

unlocking that kind of stuff so um now it's going to be the next level then

• 39:58

the next edition of that and potentially you know seeing metropolis metropolis metropolises metropolitan

• 40:06

metropolis um all right beyond that uh is there anything else that the design team's

• 40:11

working on that you want to discuss or do we kind of want to talk about what they can expect to see in the next few months versus like the long term

• 40:20

yeah i would say um you know right now the design team again is is doubling down kind of on these

• 40:25

discussions and adjustments we want to make the pitch pitch phases are kind of underway um

• 40:31

in how we're going to be changing some of the systems um but also there's going to be some significant prototyping phases coming up

• 40:38

as well especially on the combat front i think we've got a great direction from alpha 1 with that implementation of

• 40:44

split body we're going to be taking a look at some additional universal skills that

• 40:50

could potentially be applied such as universal block and dodge and uh potentially perry and and stuff that

• 40:57

kind of lend itself a little bit more towards the action side or at least towards the skill side of of having

• 41:02

these options and then being able to potentially be universal progressions as well you know where players can enhance those

• 41:09

universal abilities uh if they wish to allocate skill points into that um so

• 41:15

this is this is something that you know obviously we're taking a look at we're going to be working on and prototyping

• 41:21

and and it's going to be pitched as as part of the combat discussions but you can probably

• 41:26

expect to see a lot of conversation related discussion topics from community on

• 41:32

certain things with perhaps even some demonstrations of the prototyping so that you guys get context for what

• 41:37

you're talking about that might be pretty cool to see and that'll probably come online over the next couple months

• 41:43

yeah and you know anything that we can go more in depth with we will put you know video and articles out with but a

• 41:50

lot of the stuff that you're going to see is you know maybe little short snippets here and there uh on social or here on our on our live stream we always

• 41:56

try to keep sure uh keep sure make sure our live stream keep make sure our live stream has kind

• 42:02

of like everything encompassed so if you missed anything you kind of have everything that we've done in one little bit for you

• 42:09

um yeah cool and keep in mind one other thing like as you guys are looking at this map

• 42:15

this the world of era is very large um it is a pretty big mmo world from at

• 42:22

least comparative standards to other mmos so um you know these types of territories these types of of of

• 42:30

parent um you know vassal structures that exist within the world um they're

• 42:36

they're going to have large swaths large regions uh by which they have influence

• 42:42

over and um i think that's gonna that's gonna equate to a pretty fun experience

• 42:47

between eight to ten thousand players who all coexist on this map um and and the decisions they're going to make and

• 42:54

how they want to form the world and change that structure whether through force or through diplomacy

• 43:00

and i think this this just does a really great job of demonstrating how diverse that ecosphere of politics will end up

• 43:08

being when the game is live i'm excited i love i love like the guild the culture in an

• 43:15

mmo because you get like there's smaller guilds there's bigger guilds there's guilds that collaborate

• 43:20

there's guilds that have like turmoil between them and you get to just see that all come to fruition on like a

• 43:25

massive scale which is really fun um there's been some products that i've worked on that have persistent worlds

• 43:31

and it's always crazy to like see how it pans out and when you log in in the morning kind

• 43:36

of like seeing how the map looks from a development side is really fun uh

• 43:42

and also watching the heat maps and how how people like interact with the world and you know where they're kind of

• 43:47

tending to go to the most versus not and it changes certain just from server to server so it's intriguing i'm excited to

• 43:54

to see it all come to fruition maybe we'll have to do like news reporters from each server who come together oh

• 44:00

yeah community live stream we did that in another we did that yeah my guild did that in another game we

• 44:07

played um it was fun we had like a little house set up and we had like uh green boxes and green screen behind the

• 44:14

characters and the characters are kind of do like little news reports um it was fun it was cool to pop into

• 44:19

each of the different servers and see how it's going oh yeah i don't know i'm really excited uh that's the stuff for

• 44:24

me you know someone else in chat asked earlier before the stream started like from our community management

• 44:30

perspective obviously i'm not the community manager but you know i aid with that stuff um and i get to hear you

• 44:35

know sarah and vakner's perspectives on things um that is the funnest part for us it's

• 44:41

like more fun for us to be able to like interact with you guys and engage and see all the cool things that come out of that and all the cool content you guys

• 44:48

create so that that is very much a lot of the fun for us is figuring out ways

• 44:53

we can integra uh you know i will give you great stuff i'm gonna give you by the way a little uh snippet

• 44:59

of ash's uh development lore um

• 45:04

this this particular map as it's a little bit different the map itself yeah

• 45:09

that than the original map i had from a campaign you know with pathfinder uh 10 or 11 years ago or whatever it was

• 45:16

i've seen that one was the one that you have yes yes so that one i have like you know the seas are made of resin and like this

• 45:23

topographical like cool mountains and stuff yes so i used to have so you see here it

• 45:29

has like a grid square like a through w and one through to 33.

• 45:34

so those correlate to to specific squares that exist on the map so what that comes from is originally on my

• 45:41

physical board that i ran the campaign on players would have the opportunity to do things on off weeks right like you

• 45:47

would have your normal session in the session it would be hour to hour day to day game play but then during the off week they would have like you know city

• 45:54

development building up their nodes their leadership feeds and like all their followers and what businesses they

• 46:00

have and stuff like that and um they would have movement of followers or

• 46:06

armies or citizens and i would have a sheet that they would have to fill out to submit their

• 46:12

movements for a particular week and what they were doing and so they'd have to correlate those the grid like you know

• 46:19

i'm moving army and section f eight to section g eleven right wrist crimes yeah

• 46:26

exactly and so like everyone's movements would have to come in simultaneously they wouldn't know what other people

• 46:31

were doing per se and you could have empires fighting each other so i would have the board out and we would put down

• 46:37

flags and like nodes like where people were building stuff up and where their army banners were moving in the

• 46:44

board as well as essentially an empire like you know uh control game and uh

• 46:49

somehow and i don't know how this happened but that the grid structure a through w and one through thirty three

• 46:55

got taken over into the into the video game development and i'm like why do we have these things there's

• 47:01

like i don't know it was on the picture itself it's nice to be able to like be like this section and i'm sorry if you hear

• 47:09

gardening stuff in the background my gardener comes like every other friday and sometimes it falls on the

• 47:14

livestream friday um but yeah i think it's super handy to be able to point out the locations i like it yeah it was

• 47:21

it was good times that that is cool though but i also think it will be handy for people just

• 47:27

to have that kind of specific uh you know longitude latitude almost vibe going

• 47:34

yeah all right i do have a question that i know everyone's going to keep asking um maybe

• 47:40

i should have brought it up during the studio update but um folks are going to keep asking this in regards to community

• 47:45

side um if you have figured out who you're going to be pulling on for lead game design um

• 47:52

as i know that that is definitely a community i have many questions that i ask that on a daily basis for sure

• 47:57

that's a good question um you know right now of course i've assumed a lot of the responsibilities uh from a lead designer

• 48:03

perspective uh in the interim i i you know i've chatted with a lot of candidates

• 48:09

and it's important from my perspective that you you hire slow and meaningful and intentful um and

• 48:17

ash of creation is a very special baby and i want to make sure it has the best

• 48:22

caretaker possible in that regard and for that position so um you know when

• 48:27

when that happens i'm not going to rush anything so to speak um but when that happens of course we're going to inform

• 48:33

the community and and introduce uh the individual but um you know it's it it

• 48:38

may take some time um because i'm pretty particular uh on who we who we want to feel that we took you

• 48:45

like two years to hire me yeah exactly see it's a good thing i waited because we got such an amazing

• 48:51

person oh too nice that was gonna make me blush

• 48:58

but yeah i think that it's important it's the same reason why on the content creator side like i just haven't like that is going to be such an important

• 49:03

person because they're going to be interacting with like a whole bunch of people in our community that are sub-communities of our community um so i

• 49:10

agree with steven on that front you know it's finding the right people and you know from our perspective when it comes to hiring you know we're

• 49:16

trying to never have layoffs or anything like that like we're really trying to like build oh yeah that type of culture

• 49:21

and to do that you have to do it smartly and pick the right people and not grow too quickly because that's when you're

• 49:27

spending too much money and it doesn't make sense absolutely yeah so i think to wrap up the design

• 49:32

segment we've got a death animation video to showcase do you want to go

• 49:38

a little bit this is just a quick update remember back in the day when we were talking to you about how like death effects you know

• 49:45

you have this cool effect that is typically like a level up or a resurrection but the death is always

• 49:50

just a character falling to the ground and you know i've always felt like in mmos that's very lackluster you know

• 49:57

like if i'm dying that should be a cause for either celebration or you know just

• 50:03

complete dread and terror um but

• 50:10

but um uh so we talked a little bit about potentially having an ashes uh oriented effect that occurs on death and

New Death Animation

• 50:19

of course the reason for that is the lore behind you know ashes how death and resurrection right

• 50:26

how death how death and resurrection exists within Ashes of Creation um is

• 50:31

the concept of this avatar of the phoenix you know being represented of the goddess of creation from which you

• 50:37

know all life on this plane has has come from essentially um yeah you're on

• 50:44

something else and uh

• 50:49

you know i thought this played well to that effect because when you do get reborn it's that it is that connection

• 50:56

with your soul to the essence that binds you with the goddess of creation that brings that spark of the of that avatar

• 51:03

of the phoenix back and brings you you know to life through that to that manipulation of the essence so

• 51:09

um this is a little update on the ash's effect now to keep in mind obviously there's necessary indicators for death

• 51:17

right yeah you can play um there absolutely necessary um

• 51:24

there you go there's necessary uh information that must be conveyed of course to nearby players one is the

• 51:31

location of the body if you want to select them and attempt to resurrection two is does that uh does that

• 51:37

interactable have um have uh uh

• 51:42

excuse me have equipment or gatherables or something that you can interact with a inventory and grab items

• 51:50

from now this is for players um and not for mobs of course

• 51:56

but those can be conveyed through you know lit embers that exist within the ash pile

• 52:03

you should still be able to select the ash pile to potentially resurrect when you select it you're still going to get

• 52:08

the character name above on a targeting nameplate you know this is a type of stuff that

• 52:15

we want to make sure we still convey even though we're implementing this type of effect but i think you know when you think

• 52:21

about combat especially mass combat and you're

• 52:27

fighting left and right and people are just bursting into flames as they're dying i

• 52:33

think that's just going to be such a such a much more epic event

• 52:39

um with those types of effects going off left and right than just watching bodies fall to the

• 52:44

ground all right and moving on from there we have some

Engineering Update with Performance Tech

• 52:50

cool stuff from our engineering team which you know we don't always get to show what engineering's working on often we just get to talk about it because you

• 52:56

know security reasons and things of that sort um or because it's you know code

• 53:02

and it's hard to visualize that until it's uh created into a system that design or art has uh had their hands on

• 53:09

um so talk a little bit about what we're about to see here and then i'll play it while you're talking about it

• 53:15

does that sound right sure what am i looking what are we talking about again let's start with the unmerged version oh i see i see a csc

• 53:22

okay so this is from engineering's perspective um you know we've talked about wanting to

• 53:28

show you something we can't really show you code but what we can show you is the effects

• 53:33

of optimization and um we have one particular engineer who's been working on um kind of the rendering side of how

• 53:40

we can show a lot of people on screen a gentleman by the name of clayton clayton

• 53:46

stamper and to give context here at least from a terminology standpoint you know when we're talking about materials materials

• 53:52

are essentially these data objects that are comprised of textures you know parameters that inform

• 53:57

the shader how mesh is intending to be rendered on the client side

• 54:02

and you know draw calls are essentially a cpu telling the gpu what to draw it's a process of feeding you know all the

• 54:09

textures and parameters to the gpu so that it can start turning out triangles and and gpus calculate stuff very fast

• 54:16

so every time the cpu has to actually integrate it with something else to draw the gpu has to move all of its data

• 54:22

around known as context switching um what was that

• 54:28

[Laughter] little kitty that helps the technical jargon actually

• 54:33

um she was like what's happening i need to hear i need to listen so so this context switching um can take

• 54:40

you know time away from actually doing the rendering so we can show um here what clayton's been working on which is

• 54:46

essentially taking materials which are previously like chest shirt bracer gloves you know shoulder

• 54:53

legs boots helmet face body um taking those different materials and i know so

• 54:59

this is a thousand players being rendered on screen obviously they're not animating they're not doing special

• 55:04

effects not casting abilities but from just a render perspective of these meshes of these materials that are

• 55:11

demonstrated all those different pieces um you know they're all all drawing separately

• 55:17

and and being able to use a single material with the obviously with the

• 55:22

exception of like um you know different organic components that that get lod'd out quickly um the gpu only expects one call per

• 55:30

player instead of one call per piece of equipment on the player so here in this

• 55:35

video and this is the first one right this is unmerged yeah so here's the question here clayton's demonstrating you know

• 55:42

the unmerged 1000 um rendering and this you can't see it here but you could

• 55:48

see it normally on the on the right side the fps for a thousand players and again

• 55:55

the reason why this optimize optimization is important is because we intend to have our goal right now is 250

• 56:01

250 but we want to be able to to have you know

• 56:06

or at least target a thousand players for a particular battle right we've mentioned that in the past we want to try to get up to 500 500. so these

• 56:13

optimization efforts are to that end and here you see that the fps in the top right corner is like seven or eight on

• 56:20

average so not too good from a rendering perspective um so we can show the next

• 56:25

video okay i will change it so by merging

• 56:33

now you can see that the same thousand players who are wearing the same armors as previously

• 56:40

are actually having a 300 percent increase 300 to 400 increase in the

• 56:47

performance of the of the fps so it went from 7 to about 21 on average

• 56:54

and that is a significant optimization point that obviously this is just the

• 56:59

beginning of the optimization efforts right alpha one wasn't about rendering optimization it was about more the

• 57:04

networking layer it was about you know the technical components of our core systems um and standing those up but now

• 57:11

that we're moving into optimization being able to render large amounts of not even just

• 57:17

players actually this is also applicable to monsters and creatures as well because we have events that will have

• 57:24

hundreds if not thousands of of different creatures that are sieging or not sieging but attacking a node

• 57:31

so a lot of this is you know is initial efforts um within

• 57:37

uh within these efforts towards optimizing optimizing the render client

• 57:43

so there's a little bit of of engineering i'm sure they appreciate it as uh

• 57:49

covering their stuff so i know often they're like uh mcp's like i can just show you some some code really quick

• 57:55

um but i know that a lot of them are working on tech debt stuff uh at the moment as well so a lot of things from

• 58:02

our alpha one that they're they're fixing up bug fixes and working on some new systems like the character creator

• 58:08

and um quite a few other things like they will be uh touching touching

• 58:13

uh as we move forward um and you guys make sure as you guys as

• 58:18

as the as the live video comes out on youtube for this for this stream

• 58:25

excuse me sorry make sure you comment on whether or not

• 58:30

you like seeing this type of stuff you know i i know a lot a lot of times art and design get a lot of the glory from

• 58:37

just a in-your-face kind of perspective but engineering is is the magic that makes the miracle kind of work right and

• 58:43

um right so if you do like kind of seeing this stuff and hearing about this stuff

• 58:49

make sure to comment that you did enjoy it and you want to see more of it oh they definitely do i think we've done we did a a couple social posts where we

• 58:55

asked people what they want to see and they definitely said they want to see more uh tech behind the scenes stuff i

• 59:01

know that one of the questions that comes up and i figure we might as well bring it up now due to the conversation that we're

• 59:07

having at the moment is ue 5 and what our plans are in regards to that and i know that we do have a team that's

• 59:13

kind of investigating and evaluating tech as we see tech come online um i don't know if you want to go into more

• 59:19

details in regards to that um i wasn't planning on talking about that i think i covered mostly

• 59:26

we're always looking at that stuff as i've said in the past um you know it is our responsibility of

• 59:32

course to ensure the project's viability from a technology

• 59:38

standpoint you know post launch not just at this current stage but planning ahead

• 59:44

of time for you know the types of capabilities expansions that are going to be present

• 59:49

the the underlying you know foundation of the of the development and an engine

• 59:54

of course is is the probably biggest piece of that pie um unreal 5 has some

• 59:59

has some great capabilities it has a lot of amazing tech that epic and unreal engine have

• 1:00:07

developed for that particular next iteration of the unreal engine

• 1:00:12

[Music] it is of course our responsibility you know a few weeks ago actually no i'm

• 1:00:18

sorry a few months ago um i did ask a few of our team members

• 1:00:23

to begin evaluating unreal engine 5. a few weeks ago we formed a

• 1:00:29

um a um official um

• 1:00:34

strike team that we call it a strike team to evaluate strike teams i do like to call things strike teams what

• 1:00:41

else forums strike teams small councils

• 1:00:47

he comes up with new names i'm sorry but anyways this specific strike team is is intending to uh have

• 1:00:54

representatives from every department on the development team um to go through tech for unreal engine five and of

• 1:01:00

course as as we evaluate it and we make a determination on um moving forward um

• 1:01:06

we'll keep the community apprised of of of those decisions um and um explain

• 1:01:12

things as we go forward it's a common high question that we get we had a lot of people who asked for sure so

• 1:01:18

i know you weren't maybe ready all right i'm gonna move i also i also use task force i'm sorry sorry just reminded me i

• 1:01:24

also used when i was in when i uh used to be a guild leader um i i designated groups of

• 1:01:30

people as strike teams or task force a lot so and then we also had an engineering core that were the crafters and the farmers and stuff but anyway

• 1:01:36

sorry go ahead that's all good um we're going to move into art and we'll try to go through these pretty quickly because

• 1:01:42

we do want to wrap up and also do some q a and i know stephen is a busy guy he probably has a lot on his plates oh no i

• 1:01:49

know um so moving over to environment we're gonna kick it off with some uh

Environment Art Update

• 1:01:55

i'll talk a little bit about what they're working on and show you guys some props that they're working on obviously continued uh work on props and

• 1:02:02

updates and replacing uh some of those uh previous items with some new ones uh

• 1:02:08

these ones in particular are the kailar ones and we'll also be showing off some junior and empyrean ones um these are

• 1:02:16

desks a chair and stools so you can see the different vibes of them

• 1:02:21

they're working on legacy asset cleanup some node r d which is like research and development

• 1:02:27

in regards to landscapes towns towns all the way through metropolises and metropolis

• 1:02:34

systems overhauls and evaluations from from post alpha 1 feedback and things of that nature they're also working on

• 1:02:41

world landscape development and the pipeline reevaluation in regards to that and tools and feature overhaul post

• 1:02:48

alpha one so kind of like talking about what they're going to be doing further in detail in regards to

• 1:02:53

those things and also landscape edit layer tech which i know another kind of more nerdy tech

• 1:02:59

thing but they're working on that and some of that is for non-destructive workflow

• 1:03:04

and then the other side of it is that they're going to be doing systems documentation for animated buildings

• 1:03:10

construction damage and a lot of the siege features that we want to put in post alpha one

• 1:03:16

so yeah just a lot of cool stuff moving on to do near so you can see some cool junior props that they're working on

• 1:03:22

detail's so great yeah i love the detail amazing stuff you know

• 1:03:28

when we start having housing and being able to place things in your house i think it's going to be so fun i mean we

• 1:03:33

have housing we had a beautiful one as well it just wasn't as you know you couldn't like place all the things that you wanted to and upgrade

• 1:03:39

items and craft items for it yet um and the fireplace we have some

• 1:03:46

paintings some pots and a weapon rack for the junior and then for the empyrean

• 1:03:51

we've got hey look at that dwarf face the painting yeah

• 1:03:58

um i know you guys are excited by dwarves i'll talk a little bit about that in character art side um but we will be

• 1:04:04

showing more dwarf stuff probably next month i think we had said like two months from the time of last uh stream

• 1:04:11

we would have more dwarven things but we are working on some dwarf revamping as per a lot of feedback from the community

• 1:04:18

so thank you so much for all your feedback in regards to the way they look um in fact we had some internal discussions regarding how they looked so

• 1:04:25

um i think that you know it was an easy easy decision for us to make to make that

• 1:04:31

change and so here you're going to see some paintings some supplies

• 1:04:36

some lighting fixtures and some signs that you'll see on buildings

• 1:04:43

and this is kind of like a post that can be utilized in town yeah

• 1:04:48

very beautiful i saw i saw somebody said they wanted to see some orcs

• 1:04:54

i don't have any orcs for this one yet but we have about that what about that one image remember that one on one you

• 1:05:00

could share that one image if you want i can grab it is that i mean we can i mean we can't okay we can prep it yeah while

• 1:05:06

you grab it let me preface it so obviously you know we're now going around and taking a look at the

• 1:05:13

different races that didn't quite make it into alpha one um one of those particular races as we're modeling the

• 1:05:19

base body for the renkai

• 1:05:25

obviously getting your feedback on this i think would be a cool would be a cool uh touch point with the

• 1:05:31

community as we're as we're working on this actively um and we could probably you know even after the stream if you

• 1:05:37

want to we could even throw up like a little you know dev discussion preview of the bodies and see people's kind of

• 1:05:42

reactions to the renkai and their representation we'll do some social posts too for sure yeah yeah that'd be

• 1:05:48

cool yeah oh you have the image i sent it to you i said it the other day right i'm going to put it um in the character art

• 1:05:54

section nice very cool very cool so just keep in mind that

• 1:06:02

the renkai of course you know for those of you guys who don't remember the renkai are more

• 1:06:07

you know bulky bigger statue stature kind of of orc right um and one of the

• 1:06:14

discussion points that we had is like the ability to to have varying skin tones among the orc race because

• 1:06:20

traditionally right orcs have just kind of been demonstrated as either red or green

• 1:06:27

right and you don't really have much agency from a character creator standpoint on if you would want to be

• 1:06:33

one or the other a little bit um so here you can see the renkai base

• 1:06:39

character model and its size its stature

• 1:06:44

it's this is a middle of the road type of physique right because the idea from a character creator standpoint is that

• 1:06:50

you're going to be able to augment different components of his

• 1:06:55

body um you're going to have scales that can sorry not scales you're gonna have

• 1:07:01

scalars that can deform or create a less muscular physique if you want it a

• 1:07:07

little bit more out of the shape uh but this is the green one do we have the other one as well i have three one

• 1:07:12

oh perfect perfect perfect so like here's the variant color and being able to kind of choose in between

• 1:07:18

the red and or the green um having the ability to kind of um slide did i say scalars sliders thank

• 1:07:25

you dicks i appreciate that sliders scale we're sorry was it earlier we're going with it yeah

• 1:07:30

thank you thank you taylor spiders you all know we've made we've all seen character creators before yes but these

• 1:07:37

guys stand considerably taller than their human counterparts um the renkai

• 1:07:43

do and as as this gets online for uh alpha 2

• 1:07:48

and you guys can see as we'll compare them head to head with other races

• 1:07:54

these the renkai are the tallest species the tallest race in um in Ashes of Creation

• 1:08:02

all right i'm just gonna back up to environment for one moment and kind of skip ahead a little bit should we show

• 1:08:07

one other thing one maybe just one more thing is it the dwarf stuff yes so

• 1:08:13

huge feedback oh yeah yeah sorry we can go back to environment let's do it yeah just because we didn't wrap up environments so that they're in the

• 1:08:19

segment because we kind of just like jumping around margaret right now is just like stephen what are you doing because i have to do like the time

• 1:08:25

stamps for everything so it's like if we jump around i'm sorry it's okay

• 1:08:30

uh so we do have one other thing from art which is and i know you're gonna be excited about this one too stephen and

• 1:08:35

while we're talking about this i'll go grab the dwarf stuff um we have concept art for the volcano area and also the

• 1:08:42

transition from the volcano area uh to like the other uh like foresty realm

• 1:08:48

very cool um and then also i know you wanted to talk a little bit about the ashy version too absolutely yeah

• 1:08:56

yeah so as you guys know we have many biomes in ash's edition uh but one of the things we're playing with you know

• 1:09:02

that kind of ties into a little bit maybe of the weather system but i guess it's not just a weather

• 1:09:07

system right it's like even an event system like ash coming out of a volcano

• 1:09:12

impacting the the local dam with this kind of ash you know material layer or whatever that that exists on you know

• 1:09:20

terrain or um foliage actors and stuff like that just to just to go the next level in

• 1:09:27

seeing how events change the world seeing how weather can change the world so you have a lot of these concepts of

• 1:09:34

these of these biomes and not just the biomes but but these types of natural

• 1:09:39

events that occur the lava flowing the you know whatever and how that affects the nearby area so

• 1:09:46

love these concept pieces i think a lot of these are from ricky yeah i think so yeah yeah i'm doing a great job you know

• 1:09:53

obviously concepts are a huge and very important piece of the of the

• 1:09:58

of the asset pipeline because you know this is what modelers have to reference

• 1:10:03

um when they're kind of making sure they're hitting the mark on what the target goal visually is uh for

• 1:10:10

a particular area or for a particular asset and like you guys have seen you see the concept art and then you've seen

• 1:10:16

the end game and it's like hard to tell sometimes our modelers are very talented modelers

• 1:10:22

um you know they they really stay true to what the concept piece is uh i'm getting that

• 1:10:29

mood down art style perspective absolutely absolutely now we can switch over i've got your

• 1:10:35

dwarf ready here you go all right so to to preface the dwarf boy let's just say

Character Art Update

• 1:10:40

this is some work that's been done to amend the dwarven body and appearance from the junior's perspective

• 1:10:47

it's still a work in progress however it's very important that you guys recognize our goal is to take community

• 1:10:54

feedback into account when we're developing the game and that's the whole purpose

• 1:11:00

of a transparent development process is imagine if we didn't have the opportunity to hear from the players how

• 1:11:08

they feel junior dwarf should look and then we build a bunch of stuff

• 1:11:14

around the duneer dwarves and all the character armor and all you know the race related uh production everything

• 1:11:21

and the animation everything and we get to a launch point or we get to a beta point and now it's really much more

• 1:11:27

difficult to go back and change things so that's why it's super important you guys give your commentary and you tell

• 1:11:33

us you know what you're looking for because we get to go back and we get to amend the model and we get to change

• 1:11:39

things and that's answering basically what you guys as the players have given us as the developers

• 1:11:44

information that is very important to the development so super big shout out to you guys at in the community giving

• 1:11:51

us your feedback telling us what you would like to see because it is a great directionary tool

• 1:11:57

for us to take a look at and then and then use as reference pieces even potentially uh where we get to change

• 1:12:02

these things all right and i'm just going to show uh our lovely orc folks again just for uh

• 1:12:10

if you didn't and you're watching this like post live stream we did talk a little bit more

• 1:12:15

about the orcs in the previous segment so definitely go check that out um if i forget to put a time stamp in

• 1:12:21

there but margaret's going to kill me after this green one i'm not going to kill you and just use

• 1:12:27

the red version but we have you know a lot of work in progress in regards to orcs um and where they're going to be

• 1:12:34

playing out this is just the base model so you can you know go a little bit wider

• 1:12:41

more muscular or less muscular all right next up we've got our halcyon

• 1:12:46

spire which will show here um so this is kind of the progress

• 1:12:52

you'll see here is i thought i had to start with the concept but i guess it's going backwards um so we have the concept art for it

• 1:12:59

then you get to see kind of like what the high poly model looks like and then of course the final product um but it

• 1:13:05

looks pretty amazing i think the art team did a fantastic job i think steven

• 1:13:10

has some concerns with how it's like curved but you know maybe we'll make it yeah i know i think the the detail is as amazing um

• 1:13:19

and i think it looks great uh the only thing i would probably take a look at is just that kind of um more

• 1:13:26

uh concave uh i like it yeah it's different it's i don't know if

• 1:13:32

i like it or don't yet but the model itself is beautiful um i'm excited to see someone cosplay and

• 1:13:38

make cosplay of it too because people have made some cosplay of some of our other uh shields and swords before for sure and

• 1:13:46

we won't show the sketch for too long but this is our ebbin um our evan omen which uh stephen did show

• 1:13:53

off in-game as well if you were watching no it's it's it still has some effects work that needs

• 1:13:58

to be done um to kind of bring the glowiness out of those in

• 1:14:03

interior uh you could see it pulsating on sections tell me though because yes

• 1:14:09

i like it oh yeah i want to see that when this guy gets summoned that like the little crows fly

• 1:14:14

away and diff like disperse like as he's getting summoned out of you know you're pulling him out of your inventory or whatever these little crows

• 1:14:21

just fly away and make some car sounds and he disappears yeah that'd be cool

• 1:14:26

i'm into it all right and then next up we have the spectral eye and you're going to see the

• 1:14:32

same process the concept art for this uh then the high poly model which you're seeing right now and then the final product and also a

• 1:14:38

on it on a model here for you yeah i love that i think atkins did this

• 1:14:45

guy or did this one the uh the eye thing it looks so simple in the concept and then when you see it on it actually

• 1:14:51

looks like a little bit more intricate oh yeah this is what is this like a gem of true

• 1:14:57

sight maybe like oh that'd be kind of cool you just see any invisible creatures and or players

• 1:15:04

i think maybe for the for the mpc version right but player version this is just a cosmetic

• 1:15:10

but we will have other versions of like eye patch-like things so um if you like that vibe and that look we'll have more

• 1:15:16

in-game things that you can attain and then the magistrate which you know stephen showed off

• 1:15:22

in-game as well but i want to give you kind of those like oh i should have been a female character i like her i

• 1:15:29

like her hat it's more like a crown almost yeah this is a crown but a different style

• 1:15:36

it's very much like gesture almost i also really liked the the physics on the cloth i think those were weighted

• 1:15:42

perfectly it was it was looking pretty cool it's not that's right i think when you like turn around yeah that's a little it's getting true

• 1:15:49

you just need to put like bounds where it can flap around to but i thought as i was like riding the horse per se and it

• 1:15:55

was like trailing behind me like that type of waiting was really cool i know talking to catkins he's like the cloth

• 1:16:00

stuff isn't the waiting on cloth like whether it's like you know a beautiful dress or like

• 1:16:06

a cloak or in this case it's kind of like almost like a scarf vibe uh is

• 1:16:12

definitely always a pain in the booty but once you get it it looks so lovely and fantastic

• 1:16:18

um but yeah it's looking sick and then i have a turntable of this for you all as well

• 1:16:25

oh a turntable so fancy you know the one thing this happens like the the concept art sorry it's

• 1:16:32

missing sandals they need samples you didn't have sandals in the concept i know i know some people like to show off

• 1:16:39

their toes i was joking that we should put like little emojis on the feet

• 1:16:45

because like a lot of people do that on social media right now i know my doctor said i can't wear sandals anymore so i

• 1:16:51

know how are you gonna be the sandal lord i i don't even know i would just carry a sandal with me just like put it in my

• 1:16:57

pocket or something just like you're like uh you know if someone's naughty you just take the

• 1:17:02

sandal out yeah just smack them hr

• 1:17:08

stacy's like what's happening why are we slapping people with sandals um all right that is it for our um character

• 1:17:16

art at the moment a lot of them are working actually on um fixing up some of the models and things

• 1:17:21

like that they're working on our dwarf model so that's all that stuff is kind of being in the work in progress and

• 1:17:28

also pumping out some of the other creatures that we have um i think some of the more mount and pet

• 1:17:33

oriented creatures so that we can fill the world up a little bit more for design um in regards to dungeons and

• 1:17:39

things that they have planned like the next set is actually the next cosmetic set is for a specific dungeon so

• 1:17:45

definitely stay tuned for the lore on that because it's pretty sick um and uh we'll get right into the q a and

• 1:17:51

we'll wrap things up if that works for you stephen unless you have something extra you want to add sounds good no i

• 1:17:56

don't think so i do have a hard stop at 12 30 though so i don't know how many questions we have

• 1:18:02

let's try to power through as many as we can all right rapid fire rapid fire uh the first one is from sunscript on the

Outro and Q&A

• 1:18:08

forums asking about alpha one archetypes and they to know should we be expecting any significant changes to the ability

• 1:18:14

list shown for the archetypes that were that were playable in alpha one and i would say yes

• 1:18:20

absolutely the the ability list in alpha one is nowhere near what the ability list will

• 1:18:26

be especially from like a level slash progression standpoint so you can expect it to be incredibly

• 1:18:32

different next one is from morph the great wanting to know about difficult content what is

• 1:18:37

your opinion on allocating dev resources to make something that only a tiny percentage of people will experience

• 1:18:43

like a quest achievable for one person and wouldn't that be possible so they're

• 1:18:48

looking for like that high-end content i think there's i think there's ways that you can still achieve that high-end

• 1:18:55

content that's like one-off um but not have as much production resources

• 1:19:00

allocated to creating that particular one-off you can still leverage the mass production you know perspective of how

• 1:19:07

we go about curating content and whatnot um but i do think it's really cool to have

• 1:19:12

those types of things in place so that is something that will be present in ashes all right our next question here is

• 1:19:19

about weapon combos from as hooray as harry as

• 1:19:25

i don't know how to say your name so if i'm saying it wrong i apologize i gave you five different options but the

• 1:19:30

question is regarding weapon combos were the attack strings we saw from melee weapons in alpha one part of the weapon

• 1:19:37

used combo system that has been mentioned in previous information on weapons or is the weapon use combo

• 1:19:44

system still intended as something else entirely the combo system plays heavily into

• 1:19:51

the weapon skill trees that were not present in alpha one however um there

• 1:19:56

will be certain types of effects and or procs that can occur based on what stage in a combo attack

• 1:20:02

you are a part of and you can potentially augment that necessity with set bonuses and gear bonuses as well so

• 1:20:10

for example let's say you have you know dual daggers and you as a rogue you know have a lot

• 1:20:17

of effects that in your active ability system that have additional synergies with a

• 1:20:23

bleed effect and your bleed proc occurs on a potentially with some percentage on

• 1:20:30

a third attack with your dual daggers because you specced into that

• 1:20:35

weapon skill tree to have that potential bleed effect occur you might have some abilities that cause

• 1:20:40

fleet effects as well but if you want to alternate between utilize utilizing skill rotations and attacking with your

• 1:20:46

dual daggers with your weapon attacks on your third combo string you have the

• 1:20:51

ability potentially to land a bleeding blow but if you have let's say the you know

• 1:20:58

gauntlets of of the you know sneaky rogue or whatever that might say that

• 1:21:04

any third i know any third combo attack um effect can occur on your second combo

• 1:21:10

attack as well um so we're playing with a little bit with the idea of how we interact itemization with

• 1:21:18

your weapon skill tree um and the importance of those types of procs awesome

• 1:21:23

next question is from nostra wanting it about node xp for each specific node stage are all four node types going to

• 1:21:30

provide equivalent node xp gain opportunities to allow for competitive advancement across quest based xp

• 1:21:37

gathering xp and monster kill xp so the question is will all node types

• 1:21:43

have the same type of xp sources are all four node types going to provide

• 1:21:49

equivalent node xp gain opportunities to allow for yeah competitive management across all of them

• 1:21:55

absolutely yeah from a design perspective we want to be as equitable as possible with those particular node types yes

• 1:22:01

all right and our next one is from magic man wanting to know about quest well all three types of quest narrative event and

• 1:22:08

tasks be given by npcs or is it or is there a specific location for each of

• 1:22:13

those um like a notification board and town for tasks and some sort of announcement for events and npcs for

• 1:22:20

narrative uh i think it's going to be pretty spread out so some will be on some boards some won't be on board some will

• 1:22:26

be hidden some will be local if you move into an area you'll see it some will be gathered from a quest giver you know

• 1:22:32

there's going to be a lot of opportunities by which these quests can be almost discovered as well as you know

• 1:22:38

known to to go to a specific location for um so having a having a mixture about those

• 1:22:45

yeah variety exactly george black wants to know about blocking can you give us any development

• 1:22:50

regards developments regarding active block hold button down to block since

• 1:22:56

apocalypse um not yet that's something that is

• 1:23:01

scheduled for the prototype phase that we're going to be discussing internally amongst the designers and the

• 1:23:06

combat team and then we will likely share with the community once we've nailed down a few

• 1:23:12

approaches and prototype them out i think you actually mentioned that in the design segment about uh blocking and

• 1:23:17

pairing and stuff um weightlifter445 wants to know about arena can you give us any updates and

• 1:23:24

features in regards to the arena um

• 1:23:29

you know the arena system as we've spoken about before is going to have ladder systems where people can progress within certain seasons based on their

• 1:23:35

like win loss ratios you know the importance of arenas are obviously

• 1:23:41

that players have an opportunity to participate practice out certain builds from a pvp perspective

• 1:23:46

and can compete with one another uh within the system um so not a lot has

• 1:23:51

changed on the idea of how arenas are going to be facilitated within Ashes of Creation we've spoken about this in the past on a few occasions so i would

• 1:23:58

recommend checking out the wiki for arenas um but the intent again is is to to give players an opportunity to to

• 1:24:04

participate against one another in a structured format unlike a smaller scale for the arena

• 1:24:10

stuff right versus sieging is large yeah right um eastie or sd wants to know

• 1:24:16

about guilds will there be an option to customize guild roles for example either

• 1:24:22

creating our own ranks or picking from a list of options maybe apart from the essential ones such as

• 1:24:28

guild master an officer or even allowing these to be renamed

• 1:24:34

yeah absolutely um i think there's going to be functionality present within the administration tools of guilds where you

• 1:24:40

can customize the names of particular ranks that you want to grant specific types of permissions to you'll have a

• 1:24:46

list of permissions that you can create custom roles and you'll be able to check mark those permissions so that that role has access

• 1:24:52

to those things and you can assign them out to your members additionally you know there's something

• 1:24:58

to be said for how guild structure from a membership perspective is organized right having

• 1:25:04

like you know night groups and having you know specific uh uh compartments or

• 1:25:09

departments within the guild structure that has a leader associated with it that's one of your officers like i think

• 1:25:16

that's a cool uh concept as well there's a lot of ideas we have on the administration side and and how the ui

• 1:25:23

and just mechanics of a particular guild structure is facilitated right and our next question is from

• 1:25:30

neurotoxin about dwarves how much work went into armoring the model for the formerly

• 1:25:36

duneer compared to the nikua or was the original junior done first in anticipation that it would it could end

• 1:25:42

up being nikua proportions instead so basically i'm not quite sure about the question but i'm wondering if i i think

• 1:25:49

they're meaning like do we start with one and then kind of alter it to make the other or how do we well each each

• 1:25:55

race has its so when you think about you know modeling um armor pieces

• 1:26:01

each race has its own set of geo for individual pieces right so if you're

• 1:26:06

talking about like pauldrons and greaves and breastplate and stuff like that we don't just take a junior breastplate

• 1:26:13

and then deform the breastplate to the nakua we can do that and sometimes we might do

• 1:26:19

that but generally our approach from a from a from an asset production standpoint with

• 1:26:24

character is that each race is getting its custom geo pieces which then will

• 1:26:30

share thematic components such as color palette attachments

• 1:26:35

design filigree those types of things will get shared across the geo

• 1:26:40

but generally you're going to see unique races with unique geo all right

• 1:26:46

and our last one as i know you need to wrap up here is from one piece at 33 and they want to know about ships will

• 1:26:52

players be able to own their own ships will nodes themselves be provided with their

• 1:26:58

own marine ships once they reach a certain level basically like can they get a get on a ship that's like owned by

• 1:27:05

the city or like would they only be able to own their own um

• 1:27:11

generally ship creation is going to be delegated to the players um so there won't be a lot of

• 1:27:18

non-player-owned ships in the world there may be some escort-related quest lines that have npc driven ships

• 1:27:26

that can probably move between nodes they might be related to the trading system and diplomacy between harbor-driven you know our

• 1:27:33

harbor-oriented nodes um but for the most part uh all ship creation will be delegated to the player you have to

• 1:27:39

build up a ship or find somebody who has one if you want to get across the seas that's right now there will be npc ships

• 1:27:45

out on the ocean that are adversaries or monsters and those will be targets for players to go out and potentially try to

• 1:27:52

raid destroy kill find treasure fine and all that kind of stuff all right and that wraps it up for our q

• 1:27:58

a as i know you have to wrap things up as well um but thank you so much for joining us for our dev update as a

• 1:28:06

reminder um you know october's coming along which means that we usually do some fun spoopy

• 1:28:11

events i'm not gonna tease too much but uh we normally do a glorious gourd event so if you're interested in that and you

• 1:28:17

had fun last year there's even more stuff in store for you coming up this year with some cool rewards so stay

• 1:28:22

tuned for more information regarding that of course we will have a new dev discussion and some guild gathering information for you all so give us as

• 1:28:29

much feedback in regards to those and a reminder that our september cosmetics are going to be swapping over on october

• 1:28:35

6th so if you want those snag them while they're hot and of course this video will be available for you right after we're done with the stream over on our

• 1:28:41

twitch channel twitch.tv Ashes of Creation or if you'd like to re uh live it over on our youtube channel we will

• 1:28:47

upload it there as well as it will be up on our news post as well so we'll keep you informed in all of the places and of

• 1:28:52

course follow us on twitter facebook instagram snapchat i don't know everything all the things find us at Ashes of Creation and all of the places

• 1:28:58

and keep up with all of the cool stuff that we have for you we try to post almost every day um so

• 1:29:04

you know we have some stuff for you i think that's my perspective anything else you want to add stephen just thanks

• 1:29:10

everybody for joining thank you guys for your support we love all of you and we're excited to share our progress as

• 1:29:17

the months continue and the trek to alpha 2 is just getting started yeah and

• 1:29:23

hopefully dwarves next month we'll see all right see you guys bye everyone

• 1:29:32

[Music]