Talk:2022-10-28 Livestream

This transcript is auto generated and has not yet been reviewed and formatted. Please help us format raw transcripts.

Raw transcript

Intro

• 01:00

Welcome, ghouls and goblins, to our glorious Ashes of Creation October Development Update.

• 01:00

Oh my god.

• 01:00

I surprised you.

• 01:00

Steven didn't know that was gonna happen.

• 01:29

Welcome to our update. We hope that you've had a wonderful time that you've been keeping well and safe. You can blame the community for whatever this is. I'm, this is my closet cosplay of a Wispwelk.

• 01:29

Oh, it's so good.

• 01:29

Aka Snorce.

• 01:29

I love the little eyes that you have coming off of it. That's so cool.

• 01:29

It's creepy AF.

• 01:29

Are you gonna stand up like halfway through the stream and grow like horse legs?

• 01:58

Oh my gosh, that'd be amazing. If I had more time, I would honestly make like a proper cosplay but your girl has been busy. We've got a lot going on. So we're just gonna get to that.

• 01:58

So, as always, we'll go over a quick recap of like what we're going to be covering today. We'll be doing reminders. We're going to do a segment on PvP and griefing.

• 01:58

We're going to talk about our gathering update, which we have some...

• 01:58

Spicy.

• 02:24

That zoomed in when you were like spicy.

• 02:24

Can I make it do that?

• 02:24

I don't know. It like zoomed in on you.

• 02:24

It has a mind of its own.

• 02:24

He's trying to turn that off, but he couldn't figure it out. So enjoy the camera movement.

• 02:24

Yeah, if I apologize. I once again had to come to Las Vegas last night and didn't get to bed until about 430 in the morning.

• 02:24

Oh my gosh.

• 02:49

I arrived pretty late, but got here okay. So that wasn't a problem. But I'm not as bright eyed and bushy tailed this morning, I think.

• 02:49

That room looks falling though.

• 02:49

Yeah, I can't control the camera because it just zooms on its own. So I apologize if you get some random zooms.

• 02:49

But it means you can move around and it'll keep you focused.

• 02:49

Yeah, that's true.

• 03:10

And then we'll be doing a really short character update and then studio update and then Q&A. So hang tight, guys. We got a lot to show you.

• 03:10

Before anything else, obviously we have our reminders. And with that, we have our YouTube subscriber comment.

• 03:10

You can subscribe to us on our YouTube video and leave us a comment on it.

• 03:10

And if you do, you could be selected as one of these folks.

Reminders

• 03:35

The first person here is from Space Brain. Space Brain asks, will there be advanced options for HUD customization early on in development?

• 03:35

For example, hide name tags of players or NPCs, choose which HUD elements we hide or show and have presets for these options to switch between quickly.

• 03:35

In open world PvE, I might want virtually no HUD, but in PvP, I want more information available.

• 04:04

Can this be done at the switch of a hotkey? So they're looking for more. I know we've talked about customization a lot.

• 04:04

We want to allow for a lot of customization. But will we have some presets that people can hotkey?

• 04:04

Absolutely. So customization of UI elements, especially on the HUD, is like a top desired aspect of our UI team.

• 04:30

Colby and Grat and Jeff and Natalie and Drew, they're all working towards having the most customizable options when it comes to those types of things.

• 04:30

And being able to quickly change that on the fly, given the PBX nature of the game, as well as the different styles of combat that's available, is something that's highly desired.

• 04:55

So I know I always enjoy when I have maximum flexibility in the customization options of my UI because UI is a very subjective thing.

• 04:55

And it's constantly a topic of how we can present the default appearance of the UI, but also in the settings allow for pretty much carte blanche on what options are available to the player to choose.

• 04:55

Awesome. Awesome. And that is our comment.

• 05:22

If you want your comment maybe highlighted, make sure that you're subscribed to our YouTube channel and leave a comment on it.

• 05:22

It will be this the development update video for October, not the extra videos that we post.

• 05:22

And then, as you may have known, we announced that we are doing Extra Life again this year.

• 05:22

This year's Extra Life. We have some bonus streams for you.

• 05:22

We have a pregame stream over on Friday, November 4th at six p.m. Pacific until 10 p.m.

• 05:50

We'll be playing a variety of games with some of our developers.

• 05:50

So definitely tune in for that. And then, of course, our big 24 hour live stream where we will be playing Pathfinder set in the world of Ashes of Creation.

• 05:50

So you'll get plenty of lore and action.

• 06:06

This one this one's going to be a fun one because we tied in the scope of the campaign from a story perspective to be driven by one of the major points of interest that are present near one of the divine gateways on Vera.

• 06:27

So this gives some insight to a lot of the quests that are involved with that particular point of interest. It's called the Tower of Carthen.

• 06:27

You guys heard about it our last stream. And there are a lot of it in the distance.

• 06:27

Yes. And there are a lot of events that are in Alpha 2 around that tower.

• 06:27

There's a lot of quest lines around that tower. It is a major point of interest in the world.

• 06:52

And something very important happened there within the Aelin Empire during the fall, the exodus.

• 06:52

And it's set during that time. So you get some backstory behind the point of interest and the characters that are there.

• 06:52

Yeah, it's going to be a ton of fun. Definitely tune in. You can already head on over to bit.ly slash AOC Extra Life.

• 07:16

The AOC and the E and the L are capitalized there. You can head on over there and you can start donating now.

• 07:16

All those donations will be part of segment one of our donation phase for rewards.

• 07:16

But we also have while you're there, you can affect the game live.

• 07:16

So the donation incentives that you can see on the page, these do different things like inspiration, Nat 20s.

• 07:16

You change places. So some of the characters may have to change places. We had it happen last year.

• 07:43

It was pretty funny. That was pretty funny. Revive, we may need it.

• 07:43

And of course, there's a whole bunch of other goodies there.

• 07:43

And this year we'll have some premade magic items and stuff like that.

• 07:43

So we can make sure those are happening a little bit quicker than previously.

• 07:43

And of course, one of the favorites, the wild magic where you don't know what's going to happen, but something crazy will.

• 07:43

You roll a 1D 10000 and you find out what or 1000 and find out what happens.

• 08:08

So very, very honestly, honestly, it's a it's a lot of fun if you if you haven't tuned in and one of our previous years, you know, it's a it's a pretty laid back and chill stream.

• 08:08

We're playing Pathfinder in the world of ARA.

• 08:08

But, you know, there's a lot of fun stuff that happens.

• 08:08

Margaret always keeps it amazing with the rewards and the benchmarks that we hit.

• 08:08

And it's for a good cause. You know, Extra Life has been doing this now for a number of years.

• 08:37

They've raised a lot of money with the support of awesome communities like ours.

• 08:37

And it's always inspiring to see the MMORPG community step up to the plate in helping those who are less fortunate.

• 08:37

Those those children who need help in these children's hospitals and Rady's is an is an awesome children's hospital here in San Diego or there in San Diego.

• 09:05

And it's just a it's an absolute pleasure to be able to to participate with our fellow gamers.

• 09:05

It's a really cool thing. So next Friday, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Pacific time, we'll have a little bit of a pre stream fun with some members of the team.

• 09:05

And then on Saturday, next Saturday, that's a week from tomorrow.

• 09:05

We're starting at 10 a.m. Pacific time. Make sure to stop by.

• 09:30

You don't have to donate. Just come partake in the festivities. Chat with us. It's a really cool opportunity to be a part of something special.

• 09:30

I would definitely agree. It is pretty amazing what you all do to help, you know, the kids at Rady's.

• 09:30

And they're so yeah, it's precious. But as Stephen said, we do have a lot of milestones.

• 09:55

You can check out some of them right here on this page. And then also over on our page, we go up to 25 K.

• 09:55

But we because our main goal is to hit that mark. But if we do hit 25, we do have some more milestones as well, including things like all of us jumping in the pool in our cosplay.

• 09:55

I'm going to have to tell everybody to make sure they bring another set of clothes in case we hit that.

• 09:55

We made that milestone a little bit more attainable this year.

• 10:21

So, yeah. And of course, some of the fan favorites. We're definitely bringing back the dinosaur lightsaber battle.

• 10:21

Hopefully we don't break one of Stephen's lights again.

• 10:21

No. John will kill us. If we break another lamp, he will kill us.

• 10:21

The lamp fell over. It was pretty epic. But yeah, it's going to be fun.

• 10:21

And some of the some of the milestones will also require your guys' interaction in chat.

• 10:44

So if you're in chat, you get to tell us you get to pick some of the options that happen, which can be a lot of fun.

• 10:44

And of course, there are a bunch of other rewards that we have this year for the top two donors per segment.

• 10:44

So every four hour segment. The first segment includes all the donations prior to the stream, the 24 hour stream.

• 10:44

We will be giving a non-exclusive cosmetic item as well. And we'll be revealing that item on Saturday.

• 11:10

So stay tuned for the Saturday stream for the 24 hour live stream.

• 11:10

And we'll also have the Alpha 2 access, which you'll get access to and a random board game from our selection, which will show a whole selection of those as well.

• 11:10

And then we also have the top team on the Intrepid Studios Extra Life team.

• 11:10

So if you make a team on our team and then also the top overall donor on our Ashes of Creation Extra Life campaign,

• 11:38

you will both get the 2022 Intrepid Extra Life Top Supporter Bundle, which includes the non-exclusive in-game cosmetic, as well as Alpha 2 access and a bundle of 10 Alpha 2 codes that you can give away to your friends, family, viewers, however you like, and a personalized video from our lovely Stephen Sharif.

• 11:58

And also we might be doing something called a Death Nut Challenge during the stream, which is interesting to say the least.

• 11:58

And lastly, every year I don't think we have ended a stream on time, nor without me receiving several pies to the face, which is always fun.

• 12:25

Yes, we definitely are bringing back the pies to the face. So yeah, it's a lot of fun.

• 12:25

And then, of course, any team that raises $100 or more on the Intrepid Studios Extra Life team by November 8, 2022.

• 12:25

So we'll leave it open a little bit longer and also give us time to get a little rest in before we pick the winners.

• 12:46

So, the winners will be put into a raffle to be drawn for a 2022 Intrepid Extra Life Supporter Bundle, which will include the non-exclusive in-game cosmetic, the Alpha 2 access, and a bundle of codes, as well as your choice of an Elgato Wave 3 or a stream deck.

• 13:03

So hopefully for those of you who are maybe, you know, smaller streamers and you can get up to $100 to raise, you can potentially get some increases to your quality of your stream and things of that sort.

• 13:03

So we want to give back to everybody. Hopefully that covers a lot of stuff.

• 13:03

And beyond that, we also have our cosmetics that are swapping over.

• 13:25

Definitely read the lore for this one because it might not look as spoopy this time, but if you read the lore, some creepy stuff going on. Cult stuff is always weird.

• 13:25

But the Accord of Autumn, check it out. These will be swapping over on November 9th at 11am Pacific.

• 13:25

So if you want these, snag them now. And of course, all of these variants made, you know, help us make the game.

• 13:25

These become NPCs and creatures and buildings in the world. But definitely read the lore about them because they're pretty, pretty cool.

• 13:53

And with that, let's swap over to PvP and griefing. And Steven, if you would like to kind of preface this, I think before we start going deep into the PvP and griefing, let's kind of cover what the basics are because I think everyone's definition of what griefing is is different.

• 13:53

So yes, you define to us what you mean by griefing when you're talking about it in context here.

PvP & Griefing

• 14:17

That is a good question. So first, I asked Margaret this week to include for our stream today, a section to discuss PvP, risk versus reward and griefing, right, in the live stream.

• 14:35

And that's because there's been some healthy discussion within our community and within the MMORPG gaming community at large about what types of systems players have played in the past that our flagging system might draw inspiration from.

• 14:59

What the role of that system played in combating griefing, but allowing a sense of risk within the world.

• 14:59

And then how, what is our objective by implementing, let's say an open world flagging system. And I wanted to have an opportunity to kind of discuss and convey.

• 15:23

Once again, I know we've done this in the past but obviously as development continues as we provide updates of the development and it garners more attention and more eyes from the MMORPG player base at large and not necessarily those of you who have been following

• 15:23

the project for a long period of time.

• 15:44

We're going to get new users and new members of our community who are excited about what they're seeing, and they're going to learn about systems slowly over time and the one thing I want to make sure that we are very clear about within the Ashes of Creation

• 16:00

community is that we are always polite, and that we are willing to explain and help direct people to information. There is a wonderful resource out there that's managed and built by Lex who's one of our great community members who has taken a lot of information

• 16:00

references resources and ported into an Ashes of Creation wiki.

• 16:28

And one thing I would recommend to those of you who are new to following the project and excited about the potential of Ashes of Creation. Make sure that you engage with our community on discord on the forums on Reddit, and you ask people questions but also that

• 16:45

you take it upon yourself, if you are interested, right to go to the ashes wiki to go to our website to go to YouTube and kind of watch and explore and read and take in kind of everything that this game is about what its philosophy is meant to represent,

• 17:01

and why the game is being made right that's that's a really good step to take if you want to be an informed, you know, consumer and follower of the game. And of course, if following development is not for you, that's totally fine too because it's not a journey

• 17:01

that's made for everyone. And that's cool.

• 17:20

So what I want to say about the recent topic of the open world flagging system and PVP and Ashes of Creation is that there's a very strong emphasis for how PVP and risk are represented within Ashes of Creation, in that it is meaningful in that it has

• 17:44

the ability to catalyze change within the world through both opt in systems that are designated timed and more controlled to elements and PVP that are less that are more outside of your control.

• 18:03

And that's where the concern really lies is when PVP enters the realm of being outside of your control.

• 18:14

The reason I believe in player behavior that we have concerns about the ability for others outside of our control and consent to affect our gameplay is because oftentimes in games where that's the case you run into a state of griefing, and it's often

• 18:35

expressed that you can implement systems and rules in such a way where you curtail that level or frequency of griefing, right, but you can't completely eliminate it that people will find a way what is it life finds a way right that I guess essentially

• 18:56

griefers are dinosaurs and they just eat you know I'm just gonna not the case, but what we tried to do or what you know what I've tried to do is take a system that I experienced in the past and refine it in such a way where the large portion of griefing that had

• 19:18

the potential to occur in previous systems is mitigated even further. And when we think about griefing and we think about what is griefing griefing isn't necessarily the realization of risk, right, risk is a healthy thing, risk makes us value reward.

• 19:18

Without risk, we would not pursue certain achievements, because anybody could achieve them.

• 19:43

But risk makes us have a sense of thrill, or have some sense of anxiety.

• 19:43

Right, and and those are all emotional responses that get elicited when risk is present. So risk isn't a bad thing. We like risk risk is good not just in PvP, but in PvE as well when you can't always predict the environment or encounter that you're a part

• 20:07

of. Risk is something like, I've never seen this boss do that before, or, you know, these ads came at an ill placed time, or there's a trap here that you know I didn't experience before there's a lot of elements that risk introduces that keep

• 20:23

your gameplay less stale that keep it more dynamic that introduce environments where we, you know, the unexpected can occur, that's, that is a good thing. Now, the question is, when risk becomes something that doesn't stop other players from impacting your

• 20:48

gameplay in a negative harassing and repetitive manner that the motivation to do that action is less about their personal advancement and more about impacting your gameplay because when they elicit the response of anger or rage from the player, they

• 21:09

feel a sense of accomplishment. That, in my opinion, is what griefing is, it is outside of the expectation of the gameplay behavior that's being communicated in the design philosophy right.

• 21:21

That is, that is something that our system is intended to stop, but keeping risk still alive, and there's a fine line there right because you have to provide for the environment where player actions are unpredictable.

• 21:41

And yes, they could impact gameplay, but you want to create a system that deters that player from reaping a reward from briefing because when you deter them from that, the, the occasions in which briefing happens gets mitigated, that becomes very few very,

• 22:01

very less frequent that a player is willing to accept loss as an impact for being able to affect another person's gameplay, and the corruption system that's in Ashes of Creation.

• 22:15

I believe will stop that behavior to a significant degree, to the point where it is a very, very minor, if not at all experienced situation for many players, but the risk is still there.

• 22:31

Right. And that's something that requires testing, that's something that requires us in alpha two in the betas to see how we turn the dials of corruption, that the risk profile of corruption is high enough to reach the level of that deterrent, right.

• 22:31

And that's something that we can't really opine on right now.

• 22:56

Sometimes creators like to make very emphatic statements like, you know, you will not like this system, this system will not be good for you.

• 22:56

We don't know that yet because what we are doing is we're innovating on the systems that have come before by enacting changes to that system, which address the shortcomings of previous systems, and we have to play test that first.

• 23:24

So it's my expectation that the system will perform very well in keeping risk alive, but significantly curtailing or deterring the ability for players to grief, because we all agree that briefing isn't good, grief is not fun, that's not the intended

• 23:40

game design. And for players who work outside of the system to overly grief and harass other players in a way that is just not intended game design. Those are actionable events, those are potentially CS actionable events, right.

• 23:58

We don't want other players just playing to ruin other players game experience. And so if that's our intent behind the corruption system, you can be sure that we will refine that system with the many dials possible in corruption to better tune that so we

• 23:58

achieve keeping risk, but deterring griefing.

• 24:18

That was a long answer, but at least you guys have context to, you know, where we're going when we're talking about grieving. So let's now drag that into when and how will players encounter PvP, because I think that's been a contentious thing that people have been discussing as well.

• 24:40

Yeah, absolutely. So, so when and how players encounter PvP, the majority of PvP that players will encounter the vast majority will be through consensual systems, meaning opt in systems like sieges like caravans, like wars, you know, these are going out into

• 25:01

the open sea. These are conscious decisions that players will make, knowing the risk potential the risk profile assessing that, and they will opt into those things.

• 25:01

But as we discussed with the open world flagging system, there is a possibility that that players will contest dungeons or contest raids that you and your friends might be a part of.

• 25:26

And that's a decision point to a degree as well because as I said, most players won't go read the vast majority of players will not go read given the risk, and not just risk but you know what is risk right risk is is the potential of failure the potential

• 25:26

of loss.

• 25:26

And there's many scales of failure.

• 25:43

But going read or gaining corruption not only has risk associated also has a cost. And that cost is a defined cost there's a known value to that cost, you raise your cumulative PK score, which increases the future corruption that you might gain, which

• 26:01

dampens skill efficacy in combat when you are corrupt, you gain four times the death penalties. When dying as read you can't trade your gear or interact with vendors and NPCs, or store gear inside of a storage chest while you're read, so it mitigates

• 26:19

the potential you have to potentially safely get rid of that corruption. In addition, you have now the potential to drop equipped items and gears if you are corrupt. So, it's almost certainly a, a negative return on the investment of going corrupt

• 26:19

and as a result, very many players will not engage with the system. But again, it's a fine line between keeping risk there, while the turn briefing.

• 26:47

And you covered a bit of this just now but one of the things that had came has come up in the discussion about this topic is other games have flagging and corruption systems, but they still have issues with users grieving each other.

• 26:47

How is our flagging system and corruption system going to deter that?

• 27:06

Well, in a majority of cases the experiences that I've had where the corruption system doesn't accurately address the potential for griefing is when the system has essentially failures, failure points where the corrupt players can create a PK alt, right,

• 27:24

that has the ability to be logged in or logged out at a location where you're protecting let's say the hunting ground, and you have the ability to support the PK alt through healing and you might not flag by doing so.

• 27:24

The alt has the same level of damage output and has no risk of loss there.

• 27:43

We address that by having the skill dampening so that that PK alt is ineffective in PvP and doesn't have the ability to kill. You can return fire against a red target and not, you know, go purple so that you're a valid target for PvP.

• 27:43

The red targets will have to continue to accrue that negative corruption. If they wish to defend themselves.

• 28:05

There's a logout timer assigned for players who have corruption that's very significant. And even if they force disconnect their client during that time it still persists in the world there's the potential to drop your armor and gear as we discussed there's four

• 28:05

times the death penalties that are crude through negative experience that are that's gained, which means that even in the negative experience it also applies potential skill dampeners and keeps them from accruing normal experience as well.

• 28:31

There is an added I mean these are all things that I've changed in the system that help to safeguard some of those loopholes.

• 28:31

Now of course, as we said, we, we can't and we don't want to 100% remove the ability for that risk to be alive for that risk to be realized.

• 28:48

But what we do want to do is make sure that those occasions are few and infrequent, and are not the majority of a player experience let's say in the open world, and we do so by incorporating all of those risks and costs into a decision to gain corruption

• 29:05

and then pk another player in the open world. It's just not going to be done often and that is my expectation and opinion. It's also the goal of the system is that griefing is not a viable option or play style.

• 29:05

And as a result of that desire for the system, we will fine tune it in such a way through testing that that outcome is achieved.

• 29:05

And that is the intent and purpose of the design.

• 29:31

Right. And then that next part of this is obviously there are situations where we as developers cannot always make, you know, those changes, or we might not foresee something that players might do to one another.

• 29:31

How will we handle targeted harassment that PV that happens in PVP, for instance, like, maybe there's a streamer and now they're just being farmed right or whatever that might be there's many examples of that.

• 29:58

And what was the question I'm sorry, how will we handle targeted harassment that happens oh I see targeted harassment. Again, as I said previously, when, when, when a player takes their play experience to the point of harassing another player, and doing so on a repetitive

• 30:17

basis, in order to diminish their play experience.

• 30:17

And it is a ticketable offense. Right. If you are following around a streamer or you're following around a player and your intent is to, to, to keep them from playing the game or to force them to quit.

• 30:41

That is a dirty player mindset. It's a bad player mindset, it's a griefer's mindset, it's not something that's desired in the ecosphere in the community of Ashes of Creation.

• 30:41

And as a result, it is a serviceable customer service situation. Right, that is where warnings are given and actions can be taken against the account holder of an individual whose sole purpose is to disrupt and affect negatively the gameplay experience

• 31:08

of the game. And, you know, risk doesn't mean harassment torture, right.

• 31:08

That's not what risk is risk is a healthy thing. Risk, like I said, increases our value of achievement.

• 31:08

It increases the value of reward.

• 31:08

It feels really good that you are overcoming risk. It doesn't feel good to get grief.

• 31:08

And that's not the object of the system.

• 31:35

On the customer service side, we do plan to have in game GMs. We do plan to service people in the best way possible. And we will grow our service team as much as we need as our player base grows.

• 31:35

Obviously right now, don't need as many folks in the in those roles. But as we do grow, that is something that we're, we're very focused on.

• 31:55

If you haven't seen already how we've been interacting with people on the service side when it comes to like community management and customer service, and so on and so forth.

• 31:55

We really do care about people and people are people. And that's, you know, at the end of the day, we're all gamers trying to play a game, make making games playing games like that is our goal.

• 31:55

We're not here to try to hurt or harm people.

• 31:55

I like I like people are people. People are people.

• 32:21

Sometimes people think like robots and that like, we don't care or like, the most is when people tell say like developers don't care. And it's like, man, what pour our hearts and souls into what we do every day.

• 32:21

So I think I think our community is great at at understanding that I mean, we've obviously fostered an incredible rapport with you guys. And we're extremely appreciative of the feedback and engagement that you provide us.

• 32:48

And it's very meaningful in the development and iteration process for Ashes of Creation. I want to, I want to leave this subject on a on a parting note.

• 32:48

It's important to remember that the identity of what Ashes of Creations core philosophical tenant is, is risk versus reward.

• 33:13

And what that means is why we will refine systems, we will iterate on systems, but we will never change the core identity of the intent and philosophical approach to what Ashes of Creation as an MMO brings to the MMO genre space that is not currently

• 33:13

represented.

• 33:38

And that's a core that has been a while since a game has represented it.

• 33:38

And while the discussion is healthy, and we want to make sure that we are relaying accurate and informed opinions to the broader community who might be less involved in following Ashes of Creation.

• 33:58

We don't want to make assumptions, we don't want to relay information that that's not accurate we don't want to relay that intent that's not accurate. What we want to do is express that Ashes of Creation is endeavoring to build a risk versus reward centric PVX

• 33:58

style game.

• 33:58

And that intent and purpose will be delivered upon, and it will not change.

• 34:22

We will fine tune. We will test, we will ensure that we reach the goals of the intent of these systems.

• 34:22

But that core philosophy will stay the same.

• 34:22

And with that, I think we might have some videos to show yeah let's move on to our gathering update.

Gathering Update

• 34:44

Hey, so first and foremost let's kind of preface this video we have a couple videos so do you want to do, let's do the first one first so like if you want to.

• 34:44

Yeah. So first thing, yeah. So first thing you're going to be seeing right now on screen is the last time you saw a gathering update was last year.

• 34:44

After alpha one.

• 35:10

Or during alpha one. So August, September timeframe.

• 35:10

And in that time, there has been some changes with regards to the intent and purpose of the gathering and harvesting systems within the game.

• 35:30

And this is the biggest thing you will notice in this upcoming video that we're going to show you with that update is the visuals of harvesting of gathering.

• 35:30

Previously in games that I played. When you chop a tree down.

• 35:51

And it's branches go through the ground and then it disappears or you mine of rock and the rock kind of disappears and, you know, you do these different things and visually it's it's kind of been lackluster but it's a tried tested true kind of people

• 35:51

probably don't pay too much attention to it.

• 36:08

And what we're creating with Ashes of Creation is very much, you guys know this a passion project, it is a, it is a painting to lovers of the MMO genre and as a result we are going a little bit extra in the visuals in the visuals of gathering.

• 36:29

All to the point of creating a very immersive environment. So that's the first note big noticeable thing you're going to see the second is going to be the information behind some of the system changes that have occurred within Ashes of Creation, and what is available

• 36:29

and what is gatherable. Now, before you watch this video keep in mind where gathering was last year, and how it's changed this year visually.

• 36:55

So you have that video as a reference piece that you're seeing.

• 36:55

And you're about to see the changes here but I want to preface this point.

• 36:55

This is before alpha two.

• 36:55

This is still a work in progress. That includes visual effects that includes the environment that includes the UI, and it includes the sound design.

• 37:19

All of those things are works in progress, and you'll see the night and day difference between last year and this year.

• 37:19

And I want you as you're watching to extrapolate how work in progress will move even further.

• 37:19

Beyond this point after alpha two.

• 37:37

But I think you guys are going to be impressed and happy with the video and visual changes, and I want to make sure that you listen carefully and take into account some of the questions we ask you guys and when you go and you make comments and you give feedback

• 37:37

that you take into account what those questions are and you answer them.

• 37:37

Very specifically.

• 37:37

And then the last thing I want to say on this video.

• 38:05

Is that.

• 38:05

Shoot I forgot the last thing I was going to ask on it maybe I'll think of it while you guys are watching.

• 38:15

We ready to go. Ready. We'll see you guys in 30 minutes.

• 38:45

Hello everyone, and welcome to another glorious live stream day, I'm super excited to be with you guys show you what we've been working on and I have the absolute privilege of being joined by two of our stellar developers, helping bring the world of vera to life.

• 38:45

For all of us.

• 38:45

One of our glorious designers.

• 38:45

Mr Corey How are you doing Corey.

• 39:13

I'm doing great, super excited to be here.

• 39:13

Excited to have you here I'm excited to, to go through with the community and get some awesome feedback on the changes that have happened since alpha one last year to a lot of our resource systems to the economy as a whole and I know that you and the other designers have been

• 39:37

working hard, looking at the feedback that players have given from recent games they played and and thinking about how with further details along some of our systems like land management and how they've influenced some of these changes since alpha one.

• 39:37

And we are also joined by one of our absolutely phenomenal senior gameplay engineers, Mr Alex How you doing buddy.

• 40:04

Thank you very well, excited to be here, excited to have you as well, because of course, the magic lives in the code, and you have done an awesome job in helping design and bring to life, the desires that they have for this system.

• 40:04

And we're going to get into I think some fun discussion about what it took to make some of this stuff possible.

• 40:28

So, as some of you out in the community may already be aware.

• 40:28

This live stream this demonstration is going to be about our gathering and harvesting systems. And, you know, while we are hard at work and getting things ready for alpha two.

• 40:46

We've seen some significant changes in the direction of how we're approaching general harvestables within the world, and we want to be able to, to obviously show you guys that I think, you know, right now we're recording this on Thursdays this is pre recorded.

• 41:03

Tomorrow is live stream day I've asked the community team to prepare some of the older references from alpha one, and what gathering looked like there and of course you guys knew that that, you know, in development, we're always showing you guys works in progress

• 41:03

and those works in progress change over time.

• 41:03

And now you guys are going to get an opportunity to see where it's at now, you likely just saw an example of where it was last year.

• 41:31

And I think you are going to be pleasantly surprised and excited to see some of these changes. Where do you guys think we should start first, Alex Corey.

• 41:31

Well, I think we should lock down one of those trees.

• 41:31

I think so. Okay, so my first question, Corey.

• 41:31

Do I have to pick a specific tree, or can I chop down any of these trees.

• 41:31

You can chop down any tree you want.

• 41:59

Just pick one that you like, and just take that lumber. Oh, my goodness. All right, so to that's that is probably the first major reveal is that in Ashes of Creation.

• 42:16

We have now expanded the resource gathering system to include a great many of what the world is showing you of these resources so when you see a tree, you can chop a tree.

• 42:16

If you see a rock, you can mine a rock.

• 42:36

Before we actually chop this tree down. I want to tell you that I have played a lot of MMOs. I played a lot of games.

• 42:36

And I don't think I have ever seen a tree fall to this high of a visual fidelity standard before.

• 42:36

And let me just chop this down and then we can talk about what it took to get here.

• 43:03

Does this tree look good? Should we chop this one down? How's the angle here? We're gonna get a nice view from this angle. All right, let's just chop it.

• 43:03

I love the new UI. I know.

• 43:03

And the sound. Get ready. It's happening.

• 43:23

Oh my gosh. Look at the dust kick up. Look at the canopy of the tree get impacted and when it falls. Wait, wait. That's not all. As it dissolves, it comes back and it grows.

• 43:23

And of course, we are speeding up this growth stage, right, Alex?

• 43:23

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we're speeding this up now to just to give you guys an idea of how these assets regrow in the world.

• 43:51

And Alex, talk to me a little bit about what it took to get that physics based collision actually working like that, because that was impressive.

• 43:51

Oh, let me just begin with the amount of feasibility reviews we had to go through to in order to achieve this.

• 44:08

I remember when I first talked to you about having the canopy get rigged and actually have that physics component, I think your eyes grew like 50% wider.

• 44:08

Yeah, physics is a wild beast. It's very hard to tame, especially in MMOs.

• 44:08

Yeah, absolutely. So what exactly did it take to make that canopy fold like that?

• 44:37

Well, yeah, basically what happens is when you chop down a tree, we swap out the static mesh that you see in front of you to a skeletal mesh,

• 44:37

which then we simulate physics and apply force to the direction we want the tree to fall.

• 44:37

And when the tree falls down, we have colliders on tree branches that impact the ground.

• 45:00

And as they did packs in ground, it also impacts the stem of the tree and making this effect that you just saw.

• 45:00

I mean, it looks great. Honestly, I mean, have you guys ever played an MMO with that type of tree visual falling?

• 45:00

I don't know. Not really. Definitely not. Usually just mostly animations or it's just converts straight into lumber and then they just, you know, just drops.

• 45:27

Yeah, what I'm accustomed to is like just watching the branches kind of, you know, intersect through the ground, you know, after it falls and then it just disappears.

• 45:27

But of course, as you guys know, you know, in building ashes, we're really aiming for a very high visual fidelity bar.

• 45:27

And I think this type of system really complements that goal. It's incredibly immersive.

• 45:56

And it feels good. Now, of course, this stuff is all work in progress still. Right. This is oh, this is going to land. Let's see that physics.

• 45:56

Oh, OK. That's not bad. That's pretty good. This is what I was telling you about taming the physics.

• 46:13

Exactly. That felt pretty good. Now, of course, you know, there's a there's a lot that goes into into making a world that's filled with this amount of resources that can be gathered.

• 46:29

Corey, talk to me a little bit about what this change in really widening up the amount of resources and changing those classifications to to general resources that are harvestable.

• 46:29

What does that look like from an economy design perspective?

• 46:47

Well, I mean, it allows us to leverage some of our other systems like one of our previous live streams was it was about seasons. Right. And, you know, the changes that could come from seasons.

• 46:47

What could be growing? What could be dropping in this season versus another one?

• 47:07

Right. So the the the change to have everything that you see gatherable kind of allows us to attach the changes that you see during the seasons to all the gatherables that you see.

• 47:07

So the information that you learn from season to season and about each each gatherable will be valuable to you as as as a gatherer.

• 47:33

And yeah, absolutely. And then the other thing is, you know, when we talk about like, for example, looking at this this rock here, I don't know what that rock is before I actually complete the harvest.

• 47:33

But after I complete the harvest, I see that I collected basalt in the bottom right hand corner.

• 47:33

Talk to me a little bit about kind of that decision and what that means.

• 47:58

Yeah, totally. So so, you know, there's a bunch of different things in ashes that are be gatherable.

• 47:58

Right. We have plants and trees and rocks and fish and that animals and creatures that can be tamed.

• 47:58

Right. And, you know, we're thinking to reach the visual fidelity bar and to have things a little bit more rooted in what we know is that it wouldn't really make sense for you to see gold all over the world the same way that you would like, you know, plants and trees.

• 48:25

So we wanted to get feedback on what players think about, you know, some of the different gatherable types having kind of different things that you would have to know and expect from them.

• 48:25

So rocks are a good example of this where, you know, you can see a rock, but until you crack that thing open, you don't know if it's full of stone crystals, rubies, gold.

• 48:47

So we wanted to try that out with with with some of our gatherables to to have players have to open this thing up.

• 48:47

And that's not to say that we players won't stumble on a nice load or vein or geode of gold.

• 48:47

But most of the stuff that they would they would find to the world unless they they look hard enough would require them to crack that stone open.

• 48:47

Right. And of course, there are additional systems.

• 49:15

Some that we haven't really gone into too much detail on.

• 49:15

But as an example, surveying play can play a key role in helping players to identify locations of rare resources within an area.

• 49:15

Is that correct? Yeah, definitely.

• 49:15

Talk to me a little bit about surveying.

• 49:38

So surveying is a way that players can check out an area for for resources so players can learn where resources are that are that are static and that grow back in the same location.

• 49:38

But we'll also have resources and ashes that can spawn anywhere.

• 49:38

So surveying will help players locate those those resources.

• 49:38

So if they're looking for something specific, they can hunt them down.

• 50:04

Surveying will also allow players to uncover hidden resources that players wouldn't be able to see with their with their naked eye.

• 50:04

Another thing that surveying would provide is some of the information that we're talking about before, right?

• 50:04

Like, for instance, if you survey and inside of your your survey area, there's, you know, plants, you might learn when that plant what season that plant likes to grow it.

• 50:31

You might learn whether it likes to be watered during the winter versus how it likes to be watered in the summer.

• 50:31

You might see I see that this the interior of this rock now has or in it.

• 50:31

Yes, you found one with some with some iron.

• 50:31

So not all those rocks are just those slabs of assault.

• 50:31

I might find some iron, maybe some gold, maybe some copper.

• 50:31

We'll see. Oh, that is super cool.

• 50:58

This one was also iron. Very nice.

• 50:58

It looks like you found a little little iron deposit there.

• 50:58

And so so when players interact with the survey system, talk to me a little bit about what that interaction looks like.

• 50:58

What exactly does the survey gameplay layer feel like?

• 51:20

Yeah, so you work with a serving tool and you set the serving tool down and that tool would have a specific area in which it's able to uncover and extract information about the resources that are in the area.

• 51:20

So, you know, as as a starting out gatherer, you might end up with one of the tools. Right.

• 51:43

But as you as you progress and become more proficient with using the tool, you might be able to set up additional pylons and extend the the area of your survey.

• 51:43

More pylons. Yes, pylons.

• 51:43

Right. And so that allows you to start kind of making shapes and having more strategic areas that you're that you're surveying.

• 52:04

Right. If you could connect multiple pylons to create a shape, you know, maybe you could follow the the the twisting caverns of the cave.

• 52:04

Maybe if you're out in the open like we are here, you could just try and make yourself a nice wide, wide and shape to scan as much of the area as possible.

• 52:04

So it'll be it'll be up to the player to to be tricky with their serving tool to try and get the most efficiency out of their survey.

• 52:33

OK, I would like to to point out one thing is that are these apple bushes?

• 52:33

I'm collecting apples and they're like from a bush. They are they are from a bush.

• 52:33

That is awesome. This is a better. I know this is this is there are apples that grow on bushes.

• 52:54

So this the survey system, I think, is one that's really cool because it also all is a part of this kind of cohesive.

• 52:54

Land management system, right, is that resources spawn at a set rate and that rate can be influenced by how other players are interfacing with the resource system within a given area.

• 53:23

And if there is a high traffic and a high volume of interaction that is yielding these general resources or more specific and bespoke resources,

• 53:23

then that can have a deleterious effect on the land management score of the area.

• 53:23

And how does that affect the resource spawn? Yeah, it could be could be positive or negative or both simultaneously.

• 53:51

So the land health value right turns ties into the health of a specific ecosystem.

• 53:51

And the ecosystem can kind of scale with different different segment sizes of the world or the world itself, a biome, maybe maybe a node, maybe the players freehold.

• 53:51

And the things that a player does in those areas will contribute to to health in a positive or negative way.

• 54:17

So, you know, doing something like rotating your crops might increase the health of the land because that's considered something good to do.

• 54:17

And maybe apprehending or removing poachers that are overhunting a certain species could be helpful to the health of the land.

• 54:40

Maybe, you know, the mayor puts out a request for players to try and get rid of invasive species that are plants.

• 54:40

Maybe they're maybe they're overgrowing weed and it's it's stopping other valuable plants from growing.

• 54:56

Yes. And yeah. So so, you know, every every action would feed into to a positive thing in one area for for the health of the land.

• 54:56

But it can also have repercussions at another. Right. If you overhunt predators, the prey have no have no predators, but picking them off.

• 55:24

So the spawn rates of those, you know, those rabbits that the wolves usually take care of could go up.

• 55:24

And maybe if you overhunt the rabbits, the wolves want to find another place to go.

• 55:24

So the the ecosystem health and land health system allows us to really root players into the world and learn about their surroundings.

• 55:47

Learn learn about what repercussions their their actions have and work together to work within and manipulate that system.

• 55:47

Are you telling me if my land management is poor and I cut down all the trees, my land will just be barren for like long periods of time?

• 55:47

Yeah, I could definitely extend the amount of time that it would take for what you want to grow to grow back.

• 56:12

That's cool. That is pretty cool. And that is another component of how player activity or actions within the world have a visible and systemic effect on that world's economy.

• 56:32

And that helps to simulate the ebb and flow of supply chains of the prevalence in the locality of certain resources being depleted and having extended periods of time where the players go without that.

• 56:32

And that can spur the need for transiting materials across the world. Right.

• 57:00

Exactly. Exactly. That is pretty cool. So you're saying I'm going to have to travel to other nodes and steal their lumber.

• 57:00

Well, now that's a decision you need to make.

• 57:00

Need any help with that? You can recruit me.

• 57:00

So I see here that we have a particular type of flower that I believe only spawns in winter. Is that right?

• 57:26

Yeah, totally. This is this is a gloomy process. It's a beautiful flower, but it can only be found in winter.

• 57:26

I love the I love I love the the effect that it just that flower just got wrecked.

• 57:26

Yeah, that sickles doing work. I know. Let me see if we can watch that flower regrow here.

• 57:26

Does it regrow? Flower, of course, definitely should. Are you coming back, little flower?

• 57:53

Oh, there it is. We found it. Oh, and it's in a bulb state. I can't interact with it yet. That is so cool.

• 57:53

It's not ready. You want the petals. So. Oh, yeah. And actually, to add to this, each state has its own physics profile.

• 57:53

Like you saw trees, like you saw the flowers right here.

• 57:53

And some profiles might not have any collision and some might have.

• 57:53

So, for example, as for trees, sapling stage requires no collision.

• 58:20

But the young stage will have a collision which you longer can go through.

• 58:20

Oh, that is pretty cool. Now, I mean, sorry. Slurpee is his gamer tag.

• 58:20

Alex, talk to me a little bit about what you had to do to kind of make all of this performant right when you're.

• 58:42

When you're creating an environment with so many of these terrain actors, these foliage actors being interactable, that can have some potential performance issues.

• 58:42

How did you go about addressing that?

• 58:42

Yeah, you're correct. This is a very difficult task.

• 58:42

And luckily for us in real for real five provide tools for environment artists called foliage tools where you can just paint like trees.

• 59:10

Paint flowers, paint rocks, like everything you see.

• 59:10

And it's very, very performant because artists paint thousands of them.

• 59:10

Right. And to make the world very immersive, to make world believable.

• 59:10

So what we've done is we basically use the same system and introduced a few states.

• 59:31

And the main point of that was to make it as seamless as possible for environment art to place those assets in the world and design being able to modify those data points to make it transitions between states.

• 59:31

That's pretty cool.

• 59:51

And, you know, obviously when you have potentially hundreds of different players that might be within close proximity as you and they're all in this environment interacting with those different elements of the terrain, those different resources and gatherables.

• 1:00:12

This is a nice way for us to ensure that performance is is still good.

• 1:00:12

Correct. I think the biggest thing would be here also networking is being able to have as less data as possible to send to the clients.

• 1:00:12

So it's more performant on the server. That's cool.

• 1:00:36

One other thing I want to talk about is, is you will see here and I want to show you guys this, that when you chop down this tree.

• 1:00:36

Previously you had seen it kick up dust that was relevant for the season and the area. And now what happens when we chop this tree down in winter.

• 1:00:36

Let us see.

• 1:01:02

I hope it doesn't hit the deer. Oh, that would be unfortunate. I also hope it doesn't. Okay, it's working. You're good, dear. Don't you worry.

• 1:01:02

It kicks up snow.

• 1:01:02

What is that?

• 1:01:02

Is that a sandal? Is that a sandal scarecrow?

• 1:01:02

Looks like it. Oh, it's a sandal scarecrow. And we're in the face.

• 1:01:27

I think there was a collision of a skeleton mesh that you're wearing. That was cool. This is awesome. I love that. That is so cool.

• 1:01:27

Little sandal scarecrow. And it's growing back.

• 1:01:27

Yeah, that is that is super cool.

• 1:01:27

So there are really two main points of player feedback from this demonstration that I want you guys in the community to think about when you are talking about what you saw today.

• 1:01:56

The first one is, how do you guys feel about the change that is incorporating a much higher amount of gatherables in the environment, right?

• 1:02:13

Now, obviously, like I said, these are general resources that are primarily geared towards construction and development of nodes, the transit of materials across the world through caravans, repairs, and then they are general resources that are used in a

• 1:02:37

much more foundational way of creating higher tier mats that then get used in recipes as well.

• 1:02:37

But how do you guys feel about that broadening of the resource resources available out in the wild?

• 1:02:37

And then the second thing that we want to get feedback on. What was the second thing we wanted to get feedback on?

• 1:03:04

The visual fidelity that we're trying to reach. Oh, right. Yes. The visual fidelity.

• 1:03:04

How do you guys feel about the visual fidelity of these trees and the rocks that are?

• 1:03:04

Oh, my gosh. This one is going to take a while. Get ready. It's a big tree. It's a timber.

• 1:03:28

Now, of course, there are some things that you guys are not seeing here because they're not yet implemented, but professions will, of course, introduce layers of accessibility based on the type of resource, the size of particular resources.

• 1:03:28

Isn't that right, Corey?

• 1:03:28

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Your progression within the profession will take account of what tools you can use.

• 1:03:56

There might even be some opportunity to do some gathering with other players that, you know, typically in other games that I play, you usually do the gathering alone.

• 1:03:56

You're venturing around alone. And we wanted to take a look at maybe having a friend help you with a true person saw on a larger tree.

• 1:03:56

Maybe there's some panning that you could do as opposed to just hitting or with the pickaxe.

• 1:04:21

So we'll have other tools that are part of that progression path and then other activities that players can do if they would like to gather together.

• 1:04:21

That is pretty cool. And then on top of that, progression within your profession can also speed up the gathering times that you have.

• 1:04:43

And another important note is that, like, as these resources reach different stages of their maturity and coming back, right, you see that plant kind of growing back.

• 1:04:43

You could potentially access the resources at earlier stages as well by having high advancement within a certain profession. Is that correct?

• 1:05:05

Yeah, exactly. The speed, the time at which you're able to access them, maybe the amount that the thing yields will all kind of tie into your expertise at that individual gathering profession.

• 1:05:05

And also the things that you're using to do the gathering.

• 1:05:05

Oh, can I highlight one additional thing? Yeah, I love the new UI for interaction.

• 1:05:28

Yeah, thank you so much to Colby and Natalie and Jeff and all the UI team. And I take this opportunity to thank engineering and art at TechArt2.

• 1:05:28

Like, you know, Steven had mentioned that we came with the crazy idea of reaching this visual fidelity bar and being me as being a gathering player myself.

• 1:05:48

Like, I spend a whole lot of time exploring the world and doing gathering, and it means a whole lot to me that it looks good, that it feels good and roots me in the world, right?

• 1:05:48

When players spend hundreds or thousands of hours exploring around and, you know, each time they interact with these things over and over again, they just, you know, disappear or, you know, there's not the level of touch that we're trying to put on here.

• 1:06:12

It doesn't feel quite right. So the fact that everyone kind of rallied together to offer something like this, like, absolutely, just makes me super excited to play the game.

• 1:06:12

I want to play the game. I know we all want to play the game. Let us in, Steven. Let us in.

• 1:06:12

You guys are the guts of it. Come on now.

• 1:06:33

Okay, there is one other thing I want to talk about is also how you guys feel about the interaction of surveying with revealing resources within the world.

• 1:06:33

And without that element, for example, what we showed you today with mining, you may not know what you're going to get until you complete that harvesting action.

• 1:06:59

How are you guys feeling about that? We think that it creates an interesting dynamic between utilizing resources necessary to initiate that surveying sequence.

• 1:07:11

And what it represents for players as they choose to spend their time and or the meaningful choice they might make in moving to a particular area based on what resources are available in that location and discovering that through the surveying system.

• 1:07:11

That's another point of feedback that we want to collect from you guys. So with that being said, are there anything else that you guys want to chat about before we close off?

• 1:07:39

I think we covered it all. Just thanks for including me in the chat. I can't wait to hear everyone's feedback. Super excited.

• 1:07:39

It's going to be a lot of fun. This was lots of fun. Thank you for your advice.

• 1:07:39

Absolutely. I think it's going to be a lot of fun to watch players interact with the new gathering systems as people get to see how surveying and land management accompany player actions within the world.

• 1:08:04

So with that being said, guys, we did want to give you this update on where gathering has come to now, both from a visual bar as well as give a little bit of insight to the new systems like surveying and land management.

• 1:08:04

And we want you to chew on that. We want you to think about that and give us your feedback, both in the YouTube video on Twitch, on our forums, on Discord, all the places.

• 1:08:27

We of course appreciate that. And it is a very important step in bringing you guys Alpha 2 and ultimately Ashes of Creation.

• 1:08:27

So with that being said, thank you guys. Hope you enjoyed. And we will see you back on stream. Bye bye. Bye.

• 1:08:27

Welcome back.

• 1:08:27

Welcome.

• 1:08:55

Yeah, seems like a lot of people enjoyed seeing the update and finding out that everything's harvestable. Well, not everything, but almost.

• 1:08:55

Yay.

• 1:08:55

Yay. But with that, we know you guys have a lot of questions, so I did gather some of those.

• 1:08:55

But we do want to go into a little bit more detail on a couple topics here because we'd be here all day if we tried to cover everything.

• 1:09:19

But there are a couple things that we wanted to also just share with you all. And the first thing is a little bit more information regarding surveying.

• 1:09:19

So I'll kind of toss that over to Steven in regards to that.

• 1:09:19

Yeah, absolutely. So, for example, you guys saw when doing the mining that for the particular mining nodes that were present in the video,

• 1:09:41

you really didn't get a sense for what was within the rocks until the mining was completed.

• 1:09:41

And the purpose of that is to emphasize systems like surveying, right?

• 1:09:56

Surveying is a component of different gathering professions that require materials and tools to create in order to utilize the survey system.

• 1:10:12

But when you deploy that survey, and it's a different type of survey gameplay layer based on, you know, what you're looking for, if in the case of mining, you're looking for locations, rarities, and a chance to proc different poles out of the rocks,

• 1:10:34

you set up these pylons, as Corey was saying, and you do that in an area, and that area might grow depending on your progression within the profession, and the skill points that you allocate into surveying.

• 1:10:34

The surveying period of time might be extended based on that progression as well, so you have a longer timeframe by which you can survey the area.

• 1:11:00

And it will indicate to you locations of certain hidden resource nodes, as well as different types of resource nodes.

• 1:11:00

So, gold, for example, can be demonstrated in the world in three ways. It can be demonstrated through those rocks you're seeing us mine, it can be demonstrated through a vein of it appearing within a cavern, and it can also be panned for in different river

• 1:11:28

sites as well.

• 1:11:28

So, you might not see all of those things visually, unless you were to survey, and you would also get a breakdown of the potential rarity of those nodes, and what you can pull like pure gold when trying to mine a particular rock.

• 1:11:50

So, that's a reward table that's associated with it and has a chance to to proc that pure gold resource and surveying will help you identify the highest chance locations for those as well, so that you're able to achieve them faster than other players

• 1:11:50

who might be looking for the same thing.

• 1:11:50

That's an element of what surveying really represents in the gathering side of things.

• 1:12:15

Additionally, when you think about the profession level required to access certain tools, or to harvest certain size trees.

• 1:12:15

And that will also require that the player have achieved a certain level of progression within that profession, in order to do those things.

• 1:12:40

And before we also talked a little bit about combo resource gathering or team resource gathering.

• 1:12:40

One example of that might be depending on the size of the tree that you cut down.

• 1:12:40

When that tree falls that fallen tree would stay there, and for a period of time. And if you have a tool that's a two person saw, you can have another player begin to saw that that tree with you.

• 1:13:09

And that would be something that you would require a friend who's available, or someone who who's nearby and it would grant resource gatherable to both players in that situation.

• 1:13:09

And depending on your performance as you interact with the game layer of that, of that gathering action, you would require inputs from both players in synchronicity.

• 1:13:34

And the performance of that synchronicity would yield a greater potential outcome as well from the harvesting event. And would they be both parties or whoever's helping be able to grab resources then? Yep, both would be granted resources at the completion of the resource gather.

• 1:13:34

Yes.

• 1:13:34

All right. That covers another topic which was the grouping, group harvesting. And then we also had some resource expertise content that you wanted to cover as well.

• 1:14:03

I'm so sorry. So last part one time. Resource expertise.

• 1:14:03

Resource expertise.

• 1:14:03

Did I want to talk about that? I think we'll probably reserve that one actually. Because we want to present that in a little bit more comprehensive way.

• 1:14:03

Do you want to add that with ecosystem management?

• 1:14:03

Yeah, the land management I know we have a big rollout for it but I can touch a little bit on essentially what land management is.

• 1:14:31

Land management is a way to take certain zones and radiuses within the world that are undergoing interaction from players who are gathering within that area.

• 1:14:31

And depending on when they're gathering certain things, whether or not those things are mature or they're gathering them while they're still potentially young.

• 1:14:58

That can impact the land management score of that zone. And when the land management score begins to dip, and there's not reciprocal action that increases its value.

• 1:14:58

It can cause a detrimental effect on respawn timers, on the random allocation of node spawns for resources within that area. It'll be less likely for rare spawns to occur.

• 1:15:25

It'll take longer for them to mature.

• 1:15:25

And it will potentially diminish the return rate of resource events, this is a gathering events on those resources as well there's other effects that can occur.

• 1:15:25

Now, this can be a counter push back against or essentially a throttle and a counter push against how much players are taking from the environment and not giving back to it.

• 1:15:52

And that can be an offensive action from potentially a neighboring node who maybe isn't at all at war with your location with your node, but they want to impact your ability to progress, or to level up your node faster than them perhaps and so they

• 1:15:52

send their citizens to your area to decrease the land health and that's kind of an offensive action, right.

• 1:16:14

So, this could potentially be enacted that might protect certain actions within resources, and we'll expand more on land management in future articles or live streams, but know that that is a system that accompanies, again, representing a opposite reaction

• 1:16:35

to the game system to the player action and eliciting that that change within the world as a result of player activity.

• 1:16:35

And that was something that we thought was really cool.

• 1:16:35

Cory and I believe, and Jason worked on that system a lot.

• 1:16:56

Alright, and with that, then we have a few questions here which is, is surveying only something for the gathering artisan class or can everyone do it.

• 1:16:56

Surveying is something for the gathering branch.

• 1:16:56

So all the professions that live under gathering.

• 1:16:56

They will have some form of surveying that's possible.

• 1:17:18

I think we kind of showed a little bit of this like certain plants maybe you wouldn't be able to harvest in their not mature state, but will they be able to chop down sapling trees and such.

• 1:17:18

As it stands right now, no.

• 1:17:34

What happens is there are different lifespans of the growth period, right, you have stages where it's a sapling that moves to a young adult it can move into a mature tree and then it can be potentially dying tree.

• 1:17:49

Your progression and rank and skill point allocation within the profession that is relevant to that gathering action will help potentially increase your gathering speed to, to make it possible for you to gather something earlier in its lifespan, potentially,

• 1:17:49

and then to potentially increase the yield and obviously give access.

• 1:18:17

So, there's waves for you as a player to progress and augment when you can harvest something in its lifespan.

• 1:18:17

Okay.

• 1:18:17

And then people are curious, how do rocks grow back.

• 1:18:17

How do rocks grow back.

• 1:18:17

That's a good question. What's the lore behind rock growth.

• 1:18:41

Well, I think that in a mechanical answer.

• 1:18:41

Excuse me, the mechanical answer that is, is that the resource node response, and its respond location will be a variable.

• 1:18:41

It will be randomized it won't always respond in that location, per se, you're seeing that now, but that's because some of the coding is still is still outstanding.

• 1:19:07

It's still in the guard. But essentially that they will they will be in different areas than where you previously harvested them and I think that's the crux of what the question is trying to ascertain.

• 1:19:07

Will I be standing at a location waiting for something to respond and then it maturing over time and then just accessing it. And that's not the intent of the system. Yeah, a few people did ask that and also asking if a player NPC is near where something's growing back,

• 1:19:34

what happens when they're near it growing back. Yeah.

• 1:19:34

You mean like from a collision perspective. Yeah, like if I'm so so when NPC Yeah, when the collision would intersect with the player capsule then it would offset the location of the player capsule and move them, or, or it either that, or in some scenarios, the collision

• 1:19:34

would be disabled until the player moves out of the collision box.

• 1:20:02

So the flip side of this is what happens when a tree falls do I take damage do NPCs take damage.

• 1:20:02

Yeah, no, it doesn't do damage it's, you know, that's a it's a fun mechanic it, there's lots of games that have it.

• 1:20:02

I've experienced it it's interesting, but in environments where you have player density reaching and sometimes the hundreds.

• 1:20:25

You can create an almost comical type of environment. And that may be fun for the first few occasions that it occurs.

• 1:20:25

But after a few dozen times of interacting with that system it'll get old real fast. So we're building an MMO environment, where we expect to high density of players.

• 1:20:43

And as a result, we want your meaningful interactions to be with other players, and not with the random location of physics driven trees that might fall on your head or bounce into your bodies and kill you, or hundreds of other people.

• 1:20:43

And then the follow up question here is also, can mobs knock down trees so could a yes come and chop down a tree or.

• 1:21:08

Absolutely so this tech provides for a very interesting type of interaction, where the interactable object can be influenced by non player characters.

• 1:21:08

And that can help to sell the scene of a giant monster roving through the forest, and also potentially impacting the land management of the area, or just the general aesthetic of the zone.

• 1:21:36

And then you're able to track a raid boss that's roaming across the countryside, because you see in its wake fallen trees or, you know, footprint decals and you know stuff like that I think it's a, it's a super cool way to create yet again another

• 1:21:36

immersive element of the game.

• 1:21:36

Awesome and you already answered the question about nodes not being static they will be more dynamic spawning. Correct. And then the other question is in regards to sound will it be multi directional.

• 1:22:05

Yeah, yeah, sound is sound is something and I remember, you know, cats doing an absolutely phenomenal job with sound I think you guys have seen just over the last few showcases, how the quality of the sound design has, has, has been and it's phenomenal, but she is just

• 1:22:24

getting started, and her team is just getting started so when you look forward to, to the quality of the sound design in the game, how it attenuates based on obviously distance, how it has additive layers of echoes that can occur, depending on the region

• 1:22:45

of the zone and, and the, the terrain features.

• 1:23:06

And then finally, how do you reach a love and passion project. And the cool thing about love and passion projects, is that when you reach for the stars and creating, you know, an experience that is top of its class.

• 1:23:06

That is a shared desire amongst all of us that intrepid.

• 1:23:26

And so, some really immersive qualities and high quality development coming forward and sound design is obviously one of those very important areas.

• 1:23:26

And I know just how phenomenal cats probably like, okay, you're setting expectations really high but the reality is, she's so we're really excited to see that work further.

• 1:23:51

Yeah, and I think the last question here that I'll wrap up for the segment is going to be, folks do you have concerns about resource griefing to some extent, which is a great topic of discussion that we've had earlier.

• 1:24:05

Will there be enough gathering items for people to harvest, is there going to be, do you find, do you have solutions for some of those issues where people might be like, we're keeping these nodes to ourselves and not allowing other people to get them, that

• 1:24:05

kind of thing.

• 1:24:23

I think that, again, we get back to this philosophy question, risk versus reward. And when you think about the availability of resources, probably one of the most instrumental keys of making that foundationally a rewarding system is through the introduction of scarcity

• 1:24:23

and scarcity by definition means that there's not enough for everyone.

• 1:24:51

In that regard, you're going to get player behaviors that are driven by scarcity, such as wanting to protect the land around your node or locations with rare spawns when they occur.

• 1:25:05

And, you know, a mithril node might pop up in a cave somewhere and some guild might want to try to lock down that node.

• 1:25:29

But in the case of P, it's extremely unlikely. In the goal of the system is to deter the potential for P king that likely will not be the case in the vast majority of situations, because of the detriment of doing so right we deter that

• 1:25:47

but it doesn't mean we don't want conflicts to arise from scarcity. The desire is that that conflict does arise, and it's organic and it feels driven by purpose and meaning and that purpose and meaning is capitalizing on the, the rarity the scarcity of the

• 1:26:06

resource that not everybody has access to that creates compelling environments, it creates tiers of success. And if you're always down at the bottom of being able to capitalize on those rare spawns.

• 1:26:06

Now you have motivation for why you might want to achieve either better gear or stronger alliances or stronger friends or or guild that you can rely on those things help you climb the ladder of success.

• 1:26:33

And that is something that is a core philosophical tenant of Ashes of Creation and we won't ever step away from that.

• 1:26:33

Cool.

• 1:26:33

Just saw people talking about it. I figure it's a good thing to discuss because there are balances and I think like the economy element of that is very important. You want to get those resources and people need to want to try to keep them safe.

Character Art Update

• 1:26:57

Absolutely. And with that, we are going to head on to our character art, it's a smaller segment today.

• 1:26:57

So, you know, buckle in guys we're not we're not quite done and then we'll get into our q amp a segment.

• 1:26:57

So with character art. Today we have Gen Z's wonderful skeleton warrior.

• 1:26:57

I think I have a

• 1:26:57

little 3d turntable of that as well. I'm gonna have to watch this on my phone because I can't see it.

• 1:27:26

There we go. Whoops.

• 1:27:26

Okay, it's in the run of show as well. I know but I don't have a computer over there.

• 1:27:26

Yeah, they look really cool. I love their armor.

• 1:27:26

Looks great.

• 1:27:26

Yeah, I love these guys.

• 1:27:44

You might be seeing them in the Pathfinder campaign next week on Saturday. Yeah, that area is gonna have a lot of stuff in it. Some hints on how to build your character for those of you who are participating.

• 1:27:44

Next up, we've got our bandits labor so you're going to see kind of the creation of them, and then the actual model as well which is pretty awesome.

• 1:28:10

He's pretty creepy I think Keith did this yeah yeah he's did this one. It's great. Okay.

• 1:28:10

I like his little lantern to does he have a lantern. Yeah. And in the.

• 1:28:10

It's, is it a lantern. It's like a interesting device, something. Yeah.

• 1:28:33

I'm like I don't think it's a lantern yeah I think it's a medicals and oh the device to prod you with.

• 1:28:33

For some reason I my vision isn't as good as it used to be. It does have a glowy look.

• 1:28:33

Let me light the way adventurers come with me.

• 1:28:33

Let me medical you.

• 1:28:59

I think his eyes will light the path is creepy.

• 1:28:59

But very, very creepy he's just misunderstood. He's gonna brand you with his branding device that's meant to protect you against the creatures that might try to attack as he's leads you deeper into his home.

• 1:28:59

Yes, yes, true. Sure, for sure. That's what he tells you to make you feel safe.

• 1:29:26

And then the next one here is obviously you got to have the bandits if you have the bandits labor so here are some of the bandits.

• 1:29:26

I did see today that some of the other bandit full models came in as well so, but you get a little group photo. This is before.

• 1:29:26

They look like they're like a band of some sort.

• 1:29:48

And then we also have some some spear and shield and mace action and base stuff, which looks pretty awesome, which some people might be seeing in a very near future stream.

• 1:29:48

Yeah, very, very near future stream.

• 1:30:05

And then we have our q amp a. So, let us get through those questions. Try not to hold you all here, hostage too long, although I'm sure chats like to stream go.

• 1:30:05

Actually, do you want to talk about anything studio update wise as well.

Studio Update

• 1:30:27

Yeah, I mean, studio update things are going great at the studio we have been, you know, hard at work towards alpha to design has really been, you know, getting into the playable area of alpha two and and and getting all the POS and the node layouts

• 1:30:51

and their associated content around it obviously content is a big part of what is going to be present for alpha two that we want players to participate in engineering has undertaken some significant merges as of late 10 months in the season 10 months in the.

• 1:31:17

And the works here hunter and Zach have been doing a lot of Antonia's have been doing a lot of network optimizations.

• 1:31:17

And there's a big merge going on.

• 1:31:17

Last month and this month.

• 1:31:33

And that's always fun to see a lot of that hard work come to fruition. And of course, art is is is just leading the charge and creating this incredibly beautiful and immersive environment, and the characters and the animations and visual effects and the

• 1:31:33

UI.

• 1:31:49

It's been, it's been awesome seeing each of the teams kick kick off with, with the, with the results and what I'm seeing in the reviews are phenomenal, and I know you guys are agreeing because we see your updates and community gives me updates on player sentiment

• 1:31:49

and discussions, and it is not more.

• 1:32:10

I know, even the developers are like more. I know Cory over there like I want to play.

• 1:32:10

What do they say patience, patience is bitter.

• 1:32:10

But it's fruit.

• 1:32:10

Oh man I can't remember the saying now, I don't remember but patience is it patience is difficult.

• 1:32:10

But it's worth the wait, it's worth the wait.

Outro and Q&A

• 1:32:35

Okay, so with that let's go into the q amp a and try to get through as many of these bad boys as we can.

• 1:32:35

I'm going to start with some of the PVP oriented ones because I feel like they are textually make sense with what we were discussing before.

• 1:32:35

So, William wanted to know about player corruption. Actually all three of these will be player corruption oriented. They were asking, how will you address the possibility session inevitability of players purposely having low level characters with max level

• 1:33:04

characters and actions to mitigate against being ganked via giving more corruption slash in balancing the risk versus reward idea.

• 1:33:04

You're muted. I think you mean yourself when you cough.

• 1:33:20

It's important to note that there are certain requirements that come with professions. Those requirements.

• 1:33:35

There are certain professions that are level dependent within the world.

• 1:33:51

And that kind of make that a bit more difficult, but also, you know, the intent of the corruption system is to deter p king, especially with the level disparity.

• 1:34:08

And I wouldn't consider it necessarily a in in balance. When taking into account players who wish to be K others that are significantly lower level to them, whether or not that's a result of the purposefully creating lower level alts that can utilize

• 1:34:08

gathering processing or craft crafting professional advancements.

• 1:34:08

Excuse me, or not.

• 1:34:33

So, you know, the the intent of that system is you engage with a player who has a significant amount of resources on them and you view that as an opportunity.

• 1:34:33

You're taking into account the added effect of that level disparity.

• 1:34:50

All right, then we have are there currently plans for skills that reduce slash absorb enemy mana. And if so, has it been decided if these skills have their effect on green players.

• 1:34:50

Enemy man I see so like manna burn that that would be considered a form of

• 1:35:11

excuse me, that would be considered likely a, a form of status effect.

• 1:35:11

And those types of status effects would not be conferred along with the abilities damage outcome.

• 1:35:11

So if the player if the target player were not flagged as a combatant or did not have corruption, then they would not be subject to the status condition.

• 1:35:37

And then Goliath wants to know will killing a player's mount battle pet beast of burden give corruption. So a player and their creature, you killed a creature.

• 1:35:49

Correct. If you kill any controlled entity of another target player, whether it be a battle pet, or a mount, or a summon, you will suffer the consequences of gaining corruption, albeit at a lower value than you would by killing a player.

• 1:36:10

Now to the other general questions. A question here about caravans can two player caravans travel together to share in the defense. So you have one party of two different caravans.

• 1:36:10

Can they kind of defend. I see.

• 1:36:27

So each caravan is its own bespoke event essentially that you would choose to participate in, and you wouldn't participate in more than one at a time.

• 1:36:27

Now obviously there are different sizes of caravans, and we haven't talked about how we've rejiggered the, the capacity systems and the crate, the new crate systems that we've introduced.

• 1:36:53

But caravans have the ability to carry small, medium, large or extra large types of crates, essentially.

• 1:36:53

And if you were wanting to run let's say things like a decoy caravan in order to try to, to get players to to participate in the combat of that particular caravan those are also valid tactics.

• 1:37:18

So, the intent isn't to have shared caravan participation.

• 1:37:18

Okay. And then Louis W wants to know about naval ship combat. How will the ship firing system work for example, will the shell hit where the cursor indicates or will they have to calculate the projectile drop and manually adjust the elevation of the weapon.

• 1:37:42

So it depends on the type of weapon. There will absolutely be weapons that are projectile based that will require leading the target and predicting the movement of the, of the opponent, NPC or otherwise.

• 1:37:59

And then there are faster type projectile weapons that would reduce the predictive nature of the longer projectile times right so that might be something like a harpoon when fired, it impacts a target within its range within a manner of a second or two tops,

• 1:38:21

whereas you might have a potion launched that could potentially take upwards of three, four or five seconds to impact depending on the angle of the firing.

• 1:38:21

All right, and then mycology wants to know about arenas. Will the, will the games PvP instanced content such as arenas have level bracket caps.

• 1:38:21

Since the leveling process is intended to take a while.

• 1:38:48

They will have level requirements in order to participate in the arena but they will not have bifurcated brackets essentially that would have separate player pools.

• 1:38:48

So you will be a minimum level requirement in order to participate in the arena system.

• 1:38:48

And if you achieve that minimum level requirement you're able to participate in the same pool.

• 1:39:15

There will likely be some form of ELO system associated with arena participation that gets flushed on a seasonal basis as well.

• 1:39:15

All right, and then drunk ninja wants to know about professions. Now that the ship building profession is no like no longer exist, how will we build ships.

• 1:39:36

Ships are built in adherence to a recipe that recipe requires components those components adhere to different professions, different crafting professions that require a player to kind of intersect and or craft the craft or purchase those components from the different

• 1:39:36

professions and then once they have those accumulated.

• 1:39:36

They can do the construction process through the recipe system at a harbor.

• 1:40:01

Ronis skip only which I love their name wants to know about gathering. We kind of answered this but I think this is a very specific version of it will a player will a party of gatherers be able to extract more resources in a dungeon than a single player gatherer

• 1:40:01

situationally.

• 1:40:01

Yes.

• 1:40:26

It depends. It depends on what resource we're talking about.

• 1:40:26

Obviously with the introduction of these group based or multiplayer paste based resource gathering options, a single player wouldn't have access to that so depending on the type of resource and whether or not it interfaces with a group resource option.

• 1:40:26

Then the answer there would be obviously yes.

• 1:40:52

But at the same time if there's a limited number of resources that are available within the location, and it's achievable for an individual to harvest them as efficiently as a group in that occasion.

• 1:40:52

No. So I think it's just situationally relevant.

• 1:41:07

And then Lord packs wants to know about weapon and race appearance will weapon size apply differently to each race, such as a dwarfs battle axe being the same size as a toner battle axe etc.

• 1:41:22

So the weapons will weapons will stay the same visually from their components their theme, but the size will be adapted, according to the player race that's that's wielding it.

• 1:41:22

So, you wouldn't have, you know,

• 1:41:41

a 5x or excuse me, a Renki a Renki dagger look like a junior's long sword.

• 1:41:41

You know you would adjust the size.

• 1:41:55

And then this one's from as German, which is open see content with risk versus reward as a central design element. Will there be better materials items resources etc in areas with auto flagged PvP open see nodes ruins, then in a normal open world PvP area.

• 1:42:16

Yeah, we talked a little bit about this when we discussed the update to the open see flagging system is that the idea here is that better things in more abundance can be found in the open sea zone.

• 1:42:16

And as a result, that is why there's an added level of risk associated with opting into those locations.

• 1:42:41

As players choose to enter the open see they're aware that the potential for reward is higher. And in order to keep relevant that equilibrium between the ratio of risk versus reward.

• 1:42:41

We've decided to step up what that risk looks like in the open see by changing the flag rules.

• 1:43:00

Alright, and that is our questions for today hopefully you all enjoyed our live stream you had a good time checking out all of the good gathering updates and hopefully you like them and if you did or didn't head on over to our forums, we have a feedback thread over there

• 1:43:18

that will be there for you to check out. And if you have any questions or comments about what you would like to see us cover in the next gathering update. We would love for your, your thoughts on the gathering profession progression requirements to serving in order to know what you're gathering and changes we made to everything being gatherable and so on and so forth.

• 1:43:38

And if you pop them over there will be compiling feedback report regarding that the community managers have been rocking and rolling with those things. And of course, reminders that we do have our Extra Life live stream coming up.

• 1:43:38

We hope that you can tune into it, it's going to be so much fun. The first stream is our pregame stream which will be on Friday, November 6 at 6pm to 10pm it's for a great cause to help children so we would love for you to join us it's you know after work hours,

• 1:44:06

we're going to spend in our weekend for it. And then of course we have our 24 hour live stream on Saturday, November 5 from 10am Pacific to a whole 24 hours technically 25 hours because of daylight saving it happens that same day.

• 1:44:20

So we do our due diligence on having a great time. We'll be playing a Pathfinder game set in the world of Vera, where you can also donate to affect the game live. So feel free to check out the donation options there they're all incentives on our page.

• 1:44:36

So head over to bit.ly slash AOC Extra Life and check it out. We have a whole ton of milestones that will be available for you to unlock, including alpha to giveaways. We have tons of rewards check out our article over on our news page for more details or head on over to our page that has all the details as well on there.

• 1:44:55

And remember that our cosmetic swap over will be happening on November 9 2022 at 11am. That is the accord of autumn and I highly recommend checking out the news article for this one, because the lore is a spooky and creepy and lots of culty stuff which you know,

• 1:44:55

if you're into that it's kind of fun.

• 1:45:12

Yeah, and I just want to add to the Extra Life thoughts as a parting thought here is, again, you do not have to donate just come and join us it's going to be really fun time. Tell your friends to come join us as you're gaming keep our stream up and interact and chat

• 1:45:29

with us and you're going to get some fun tidbits of lore behind a lot of what the POS and alpha two will have available it might even give you some helpful pointers on how to overcome some of the challenges and obstacles and some of these quest lines

• 1:45:29

and events that I think can be super fun, but ultimately it's really just for a good cause and. Hey, you know, it's a it's a fun time, so try to set aside some time come chat with us be a part of the community.

• 1:45:58

It's a good cause and it's, I think it's something important for communities to be part of.

• 1:45:58

People want the cat cam they want me to bring my cats again this year.

• 1:45:58

We got an auto feeder so we don't technically have to bring them but if Stephen is fine with it we could.

• 1:45:58

They did it they did enjoy lots of pets last time.

• 1:45:58

Get into one of the, the, the death nuts though that was.

• 1:46:23

No. Be careful though because Lucy does try to eat weird stuff. That's what I'm saying, you might eat one of those like 1213 million scoville death nuts.

• 1:46:23

No, we'll keep them away. And of course we will have two videos for you. The first one will be today we'll have the high res version of all the harvesting or the gathering stuff.

• 1:46:43

So if you want to check that out we will be sharing that shortly here on all of our social channels so take you know follow us and all the places we do post every day.

• 1:46:43

Our team is always rocking it Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever your jam is we're probably there Ashes of Creation.

• 1:46:58

And of course, we will be uploading this full dev update that will come out Saturday so. Oh, and there is a 2k video or 4k video whatever it is, of what you just saw with the gathering that's going to be going up on YouTube just after this stream so if you want to take a look at it to get.

• 1:46:58

I just said.

• 1:47:16

It's okay. It's all good. And of course, for this video that we posed, if you leave us a comment for the next month you could pass subscribe and leave a comment.

• 1:47:16

You could be a lucky winner of us drawing your comment, which we will spotlight like we did today for brain space.

• 1:47:36

So with that, we will be heading out. Thank you all so much for staying with us for this very long stream, and we will see you next month, we'll actually know we'll see you before next month.

• 1:47:46

We'll see you in a week, Friday. Yeah, we'll see you next week for some more action and of course next month for our next development update.

• 1:48:16

Yeah.