Combat revamp

Alpha-1 split-body melee weapon combat sneak peek.

I can move while swinging on this guy. I can back up then continue to attack him. Just have complete control over my character while attacking. – Steven Sharif

A revamped combat system will be rolled out during and post Alpha-1 testing based on player feedback.

I just want to give kudos to the combat team, because in my opinion having played this and watched this and seen the community's response to it, they've done a great job in moving away from what was our direction prior to Alpha-1 to now having developed for Alpha-2 a significantly revamped combat experience; and I think it feels good and it plays well and it's fun. – Steven Sharif

• The goal is to give more agency to the player and achieve a more fluid flow of combat with greater mobility when using abilities.
• The current hybrid tab and action combat system will remain after the revamp.
• This revamp will not represent the final form of combat, but will set the general direction that combat will be taking.
• The revamp will be iterative and will be rolled out to testers in different phases.
• The developers will be testing whether or not to use global cooldowns GCDs on different types of abilities during Alpha-2.
  • As of July 2023 global cooldowns are not currently in the game.
  • Instant cast abilities are referred to as off-global-cooldown or OGCD abilities.

The revamped combat system will feature split-body animations, where the character's upper body can be locked by weapon attack animations while the lower body is free to continue moving.

You'll be able to move forward while swinging your weapon; and this will allow you complete control over your weapon attacks for melee. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-1 combat was focused on core functionality rather than combat balance. Alpha-2 combat will include archetypes, significant ability support, augments, split-body combat, weapon attacks, and many additional items, among other things.

• Changes that allow templated abilities to apply to 3D positions in the air or water will be prototyped and may be included in Alpha-2.

Mobility

Revamped Alpha-1 Mage Fireball ability.

The general approach that we're taking based on a lot of feedback and just good combat design in general. You know philosophy is that we want to give more agency in the hands of the player and the antithesis of that is locking the player down for really long amounts of time. The sort of concept behind that is like you could make an animation effects as glorious looking as possible but if it's taking away control of the player, none of that really matters. Especially the 100th or thousandth time you're using the spell you're tired of that happening you don't feel powerful: You feel the opposite of powerful. So we're trying to like give a lot of control back to the player while they're using these abilities so they can still control their movements, they can react simultaneously while they're taking actions; and we just want to get overall more of a fluid flow, I guess, of combat. And that's the general design philosophy we're using to approach the overhaul. – Tradd Thompson

• The revamped combat system features split-body animations, where the character's upper body can be locked by weapon attack animations while the lower body is free to continue moving.

A lot of abilities you have the capability of moving while casting. It's going to decrease your movement speed significantly or depending on the type of ability. We do reserve the cost- and that's really what it is when you tie ability usage to mobility- we do reserve the cost of requiring the character to remain stationary on some big effect type abilities. – Steven Sharif

• Most abilities in Ashes of Creation are capable of being cast while moving. Some abilities may slow the caster down during the cast, but only rarely will the player be rooted in place.
  • Movement speed can decrease significantly depending on the type of ability.
  • Weapon weight can also affect mobility.
  • Skills with the greatest power may require the caster to remain stationary while channeling them. This is a risk vs. reward mechanic.

Most abilities you'll find in Ashes of Creation are capable of being cast while moving. Some of those abilities might slow your movement during the cast, but you can continue to move. Very rarely, and depending on obviously the importance of the ability or the power level of that ability, you might be rooted in place. So, for example, the AoE ability [Chains of Restraint] has a lot going on. It has damage ticking over time, it is an area of effect, it also has a status condition application; and in those instances the player character gets rooted. – Steven Sharif

• Ranged archetypes will have gap openers to counter gap closers from archetypes like the Fighter.

That's the cat-and-mouse of these abilities. Like we've seen with the Ranger, they have a backflip, they have their Airdrop [sic] ability. The Mage has teleportation. There are going to be abilities that are tit-for-tat; and managing the resource of those abilities and the timing of when you use them to either correlate to your opponent's use of those things, or to save them for yourself when you want to get away, that's part of what makes the engagements dynamic and different each time. – Steven Sharif

• Unreal Engine 5 has enabled improved forms of locomotion, such as crouching, tilting and mantling.
  • Crouching may or may not be in the game.

• The ability to prone is not be in the game.

• Moving backward will likely not affect block and parry.

• Player movement speed during combat is balanced for both PvE and PvP.

There's a balance in the game design between your movement speed on attack and the movement speed of your opponent. When you have a game that is both PvE centric as well as PvP centric, you have to make sure that combat is blended for both approaches; and we can always run into problems where, if you're significantly hampered in your movement speed, that has an effect on how we expect player versus player engagements to interact; and we don't want to restrict a player's ability to be mobile if they're the target of an attack. And as a result of that we need to make sure that we don't restrict the movement abilities of the player who is doing the attacking as well. So we want it to be relatively free for you to stay with each other. Your opponents move around the battlefield together and if we're hampering you on the attack action, we have to then implement some type of snare, or slow, or cc effect essentially on your opposing target; and that's not the approach we want to take for for PvP. – Steven Sharif

• Melee archetypes will offer various mobility and CC counters against ranged archetypes, such as the Ranger.

If we're talking about Fighter, they're going to have a lot of heavy gap closers. They can probably be a little bit more liberal in the use of their gap closers because they have so many of them, versus let's say a Ranger that needs to choose when to use their escape abilities, because they have fewer of them. The same would be true for a melee character like a rogue. Their approach vector is going to be more stealth-driven than it would be perhaps let's say from a gap-closer perspective. – Steven Sharif

Q: If a ranger is super mobile, what are the melee's options in order to catch them?

A: Different class kits will provide different gap closers. They'll provide different mobility skills. They'll have lockdowns. They'll have chains to pull back. They'll have a lot of different things in the rotation. That's part of what an MMORPG experience is. You're not just restricted to three or six skills, you have a rotational suite; and depending on the type of challenges you face is going to help determine which of those rotations you spec into from your skill tree. – Steven Sharif

Skill	Icon	Origin	Description
Air Strike		Ranger	Leap a great distance forward and into the air while firing three projectiles in a line along the path, each dealing area damage and rooting targets hit for 3 seconds. Rotation control is enabled during cast. The root effect is nature based.
Blink		Mage	Instantly teleport a set distance in the direction you are moving.
Blitz		Fighter	Charge directly toward target enemy, dealing Physical damage to the target on arrival.
Call of the Wild		Ranger	Remove all movement impairing effects and increase movement speed by 20% for 8 seconds. Snares and Roots effects applied to the caster are ignored.
Caravan Trail Speed Bonus		Caravan	Minor speed boost for travelling on a simple trail.
Exert		Fighter	Consume your Combat Momentum rapidly, gaining 20% increased attack and movement speed and immunity to disabling effects while active. Must have at least 20 Combat Momentum to activate, and the effect ends when all Combat Momentum is fully depleted.
Form Of Celerity		Fighter	While in this form, the caster receives +2% Movement Speed per 10 Combat Momentum, up to a maximum of +20%. Shifting form costs 20% of current Combat Momentum and triggers cooldown for all Combat Forms.
Form Of Fluidity		Fighter	While in this form, the caster receives +4% Disable Resistance Chance per 10 Combat Momentum, up to a maximum of +40%. Shifting form costs 20% of current Combat Momentum and triggers cooldown for all Combat Forms.
Leap Strike		Fighter	Leap to target location and deal damage around you, snaring targets hit for 3 seconds.
Lunging Assault		Fighter	Spend 15 Combat Momentum to lunge in a direction a short distance and perform an upward swing upon arrival, dealing damage to enemies in front of you. You are immune to hard crowd control effects while performing this ability.
Recharging Lunging Assault		Fighter	Lunging Assault gains an additional charge and generates 5 additional Combat Momentum when dealing damage to one or more enemies.
Shield Assault		Tank	Bashes the target with your shield, dealing damage and applying the shaken condition. If the target is already suffering from the shaken condition, stun the target instead.
Speed Boost		Caravan	Gives the caravan a temporary speed boost.
Unstoppable Exert		Fighter	Exert additionally breaks all hard control effects on the caster, and may be used any time while under a hard controlling effect.
Whirlwind		Fighter	Channeled Ability: Deal physical damage to all enemies around the caster with each spin while channeled, increasing the spin rate the longer it is channeled. The caster is immune to hard disabling effects while spinning. Activate the ability again to end channeling early.
Wings of Salvation		Cleric	Sprout phoenix-like wings and leap to target ally, then grant a small amount of temporary health to that target on arrival. An ally is defined as any non-combatant player or non-mob NPC.

PvP

PvP combat gameplay in Alpha-1 castle sieges.

Alpha-2 open world caravan PvP.

Player combat in Ashes of Creation is both vast and intimate. It spans many aspects of the game itself. From great political battles held on the fields of massive castles, to open world conflicts fought for the pride of Guild Leaders. A player can choose to participate in the fate of the world by swaying the tide of battle with his or her combat prowess. Our PvP mechanics follow a flagging system, as well as static PvP zones at certain points of interest; fight for control over cities, castles, caravans, or hunting grounds. Our PvP is designed to offer the players a well-balanced and fair world to shape through the pen, or sword should they choose.

PvP (Player versus player combat) is the catalyst for change in Ashes of Creation. Player combat is intended to be meaningful, ranging from Caravan battles to vast open world conflicts fought for the pride of Kings and Queens.

Because players are motivated by different things, because they want something from the game that other players don't want, that's going to cause people to butt heads. Different players are going to want different experiences and the conflict between the two of them will create a bigger and better thing. Out of strife comes rebirth and that's a core symbol, it's a core theme that occurs throughout the game. – Jeffrey Bard

• The majority of players will experience PvP through opt-in objective-based battlegrounds. These are high risk and high reward encounters that do not utilize the corruption system.
  • Sieges.
  • Caravans.
  • Guild wars.
  • Naval PvP in the open sea.

  Better things in more abundance can be found in the open-sea zone. And as a result, that is why there's an added level of risk associated with opting into those locations. – Steven Sharif

  • Death penalties (mostly) do not apply to objective-based events (also called sanctioned events).
    • Gear degradation applies on death during Caravan PvP.

• There are also reasons to engage in open world PvP, which is subject to the player flagging and corruption system.
  • Contesting open-world dungeons or raids.
  • Contesting scarce resources and hunting grounds.
• The risk of gaining corruption is expected to deter the vast majority of players from griefing other players but this doesn't mean that PvP won't occur in the open-world.

Just because our flagging system gives corruption to PKers, doesn't mean PvP won't happen. There is plenty of reason for PvP to occur open-world. – Steven Sharif

Q: Have you considered a high-stakes loot drop PvP zone/area in Verra?

A: We have not; and the reason for that is our current PvP systems already allow for material risk essentially that's either through the flagging system or through other event-based pvp opt-in systems as well. – Steven Sharif

• Archetypes such as Tank and Bard are viable in PvP due to the rock-paper-scissors design philosophy, where each class is naturally strong against certain skill compositions.

Alpha-1 testing

Hail and well met glorious Ashes of Creation testers. My name is Sean Farrens. I am the manager of quality assurance on Ashes of Creation and on behalf of the Ashes QA team I would like to extend a deep and heartfelt thank you to everyone who participated in testing Ashes of Creation during the weekend of May 14 through May 16th for our Alpha 1 build. In spite of instability and uncertainty you have all proven to be invaluable in regards to your feedback and bug reports; and for that I cannot express my gratitude enough. As many of you know, developing an MMORPG is an epic endeavor that is filled with trials and tribulations that no other game will ever encounter; and your illustrated dedication has proven to our team that we are on a high road to the best MMORPG gaming experience to date. During this most recent testing period we received over 2,600 bug reports, which have been an absolute boon to our testing process. We review each report individually and I continue to be impressed with how detailed and helpful each of these reports has been. Like seriously you guys give repro steps and everything. Super duper handy. I greatly look forward to your feedback in the future and hope you enjoy our content so far, so thank you so much everybody. – Sean Farrens

While we will have specific spot tests for certain systems as we develop them post the Alpha one month, it should be expected and understood that after this Alpha one month there will be probably a significant amount of downtime where there won't be spot testing as we break apart a lot of systems, take what we learned from alpha one month and implement and iterate upon those learnings. So there's gonna be several months probably worth of significant downtime where there will not be access to spot testing, where we are going to go in and really rejigger a lot of systems – Steven Sharif

Phase	Release	Estimated/Actual date
Alpha-1	Alpha-1 early preview livestream.	March 27, 2020.
	Alpha-1 limited QA testing (NDA).	May 28, 2020.
	Alpha-1 preview pre-test 1 (NDA).	Dec 18 - Dec 21 2020.
	Alpha-1 preview pre-test 2 (NDA).	Feb 19 - Feb 22 2021.
	Alpha-1 preview intermittent spot testing (NDA).	Mar 19 - Jul 9 2021.
	Alpha-1 preview weekend (no NDA).	July 9 - July 11 2021.
	Alpha-1 (no NDA).	July 14 - August 15 2021.

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The term "alpha" is a tricky one, and it typically has 2 meanings in gaming. The development meaning for alpha is a point in the process where we are ready to test the fundamental systems in their core form, without polish and without much of the content. Then, there is the external or "marketing" term for alpha. This is typically applied to Eastern-ported MMORPGs, when in fact that is a completed game being localized for a region, and not really indicative of a true development alpha. As you may know by now, game development has many stages - from the initial tech demos to the pre-production and pre-alpha states, then on to the alphas and betas and eventually launch. – Steven Sharif

I want to make emphatically clear, our alphas and betas are true development alphas and betas, and some have said I am crazy to allow these phases to be seen without an NDA…maybe I am crazy? lol… But I am trusting the community of gamers out there to get a glimpse into the process, and understand the long road ahead for what will eventually be worth the wait. Given time and talent, amazing things can happen, so make sure you help us in communicating that we are in open development which means people get to see the bare bones before the meat. And look, I know people see our 4K footage and say, "This looks better than most released games!", but trust me when I say, you ain't seen nothin’ yet. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-1 testing goals

Server deployment and performance testing

• Stress-test our server deployments and player concurrency numbers with high volumes of player activity and interactions.
• Stand up multiple world server deployments across different geographical regions.
• Soak test server grid health over a continuous period of production use.
• Evaluate current networking architecture, and identify non-performant code and areas for additional optimizations or refactoring.
• Test our build strategy and hot-fix deployment procedures, account services, web-based systems, launcher and patcher stability, and cloud-based infrastructure.

System functionalities and behavior testing (in their core state)

• Node features (In their core state).
• Experience collection – The ability for nodes to collect and store accrued experience from players in their Zone of influence and for this data to persist in a global hierarchy of the node matrix.
• Propagation – The ability for nodes to advance in stages, reflecting the appropriate advancements in the following: culture, layout, quest hooks, spawners, crafting and processing stations, NPCs, service buildings, merchant tables, prop placement, housing, citizenship, government systems (election, appointment, terms, admin interface) and taxes, |points of interest propagation and advancement, public projects, and parenting/vassal hierarchy.

Player character systems (in their core state)

• Experience collection and persistence, experience debt, death effects, corruption and flagging, inventory systems, character paper doll and equipable items, property ownership and player storage, stats and waterfall derivatives, combat and ability systems, tab and action states, race and class selection and their customization, movement and character states, looting and party management systems.

Ancillary systems (in their core state)

• Caravans, drop, spawn, and reward table adaptations, player trading, mount and vehicle systems, raid and party functionality, guild progression and persistence, guild hierarchy, chat systems, customized AI behavior trees, boss functionality, harvesting prerequisites and procedural resource spawners, recipes and craft station systems, interactable containers and objects, global event manager, siege and battleground systems, open world traversal and dungeon design, quest and narrative dialogue setup.

The above is not a comprehensive list of everything being tested in Alpha One, but it hits the primary points. There are many other data metrics being collected for our approach to the content production pipelines, system definitions, and refactoring as well. Not to mention a plethora of technical art implications and optimizations, but you get the gist. This is a very fundamental test that will impact the direction of development post-Alpha One, so you can understand the importance of testing and its need for player participation, attention, and feedback. – Steven Sharif

See also

• Combat
• Mobility
• Fireball
• PvP