View source for Talk:2017-09-03 Video - PAX West full panel

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[Music] I cannot tell you the in just emotions right now looking at this audience right here honestly we were walking over we were terrified very deep emotion it was like a last-minute decision to do the panel and walking over I was talking to Jeff and I was just like Jeff I hope there's gonna be people there on top of that I'm like why don't we just walk to San Diego oh this is crazy the West it was kind of far but guys thanks for showing up honestly we have a lot to talk about today and we're gonna do our traditional kind of Q&A session we have a couple mics that are out there so people want to ask some questions feel free to raise your hand when we get to that part but how many of you guys have been to the booth and tried Ashes of Creation [Applause] and what do you guys think of our pre-alpha build I gotta tell you this team our team we were living in a dungeon for the past three months straight like no joke there was like no light when we stepped out we didn't even we came in so early in the morning that the Sun wasn't out and we didn't leave until it was nighttime so when we flew in the morning to Seattle it was like you know I had like dizziness like it was crazy that's regular eyes for me oh yeah absolutely we should I'm sorry Jeff so I am Jeffrey bard I am lead designer of Ashes of Creation I am Steven Shareef I'm the creative director and founder of intrepid Studios Keith go back I'm one of the senior character artist and Tropic I'm Michael bacon general theatre general artist I am at berm I'm a senior characterize alright we finally are letting the artists out to talk a little bit got so busy at the booth on Friday that I didn't have time to get on stream and I was like Michael take it and run with it it's very very very bad it's pretty crazy so let's start with actually uh one announcement that we made and we leaked I think a day before PAX actually began we have a date for our alpha zero what is that date Steven it is December 15 2017 this year this year yep absolutely we actually we were having a long discussion about whether or not we could reach our alpha zero this year yeah and honestly I mean the team has been unbelievable you know with the experience that's actually here at intrepid with the the MMORPG specific experience that we were actually able to turn out that alpha zero this year yeah I mean with what we've got for pax when we were able to get done for PAX kind of showed us that hey we can work at this rate for a really long time so um what we were able to get done for pax was really surprising to me and we can push that to our alpha zero pretty pretty easily you weren't supposed to tell anybody that what what it was surprising we were we were confident the entire time no we were but now right like this is this is a panel just kind of get to me word up until 5 a.m. the entire week before coming to Seattle at all no no no we had it it was easy right it was easy yeah yeah right yeah no so actually what I wanted to do before we get into a couple other announcements is kind of just run you guys through the process of bringing together honestly a start-up studios I don't know if anybody really knows this but Keith Kovac was actually the first person hired at Intrepid Studios that was before there was an office right yeah actually no no there was an office but there was a couple of desk and no computers his interview he walked into was it was just desks there that were completely empty no monitors no computers no nothing in this like warehouse looking building yeah and Stevenson any one chair in the center of the building and I was like walk to me yeah it was you know it's a it was a crazy experience you walk into somewhere that you don't know if you're in the right spot and you only have one person Stephen just explaining this idea like he's like spilling it so passionately and you're like okay I'm on that sounds really good I'm like when do the computers actually came through at least another couple weeks yeah that's crazy no I kept thinking back to it now even though that was like it'll be what two years in December two years in December December second yeah yeah December second two years and that was just such a surreal experience actually now going through and just looking at like these people that were going to make this game a reality and and seeing the talent that was coming in through those doors was unbelievable like I I I actually get a little bit kind of emotional when I think about it but you know being here now today at PAX and seeing this actually come to fruition is like unbelievable yes it's absolutely amazing yeah like I was been working the front of the line all the last three days so I recognized like a lot of you guys like I personally talked to you and you guys all seemed so excited about the game he probably drives up he's a hug ya know pretty cool so tell us some actually Jeff okay a little bit about your experience coming on board yeah so I got a heads up from a buddy of mine who was talking about the Stephon character who was interested in starting up a new a new studio in San Diego and wanted to make an MMO I never heard of him I've never heard of the studio it kind of just appeared out of nowhere and I was like okay I'll talk to him it didn't really sound like it would be something realistic or you know cuz I've been there before I've seen I've seen Studios rise and fall and people who think that making games is easy and can you know just like turn around a really cool really big idea in a couple of months right like I've seen that a lot so I kind of expected something really similar but I wanted to talk anyways because I owed my friend a favor and so oh my god alright so I came to the studio and I got interviewed by Steven and a couple of other people who were there already and his pitch was really intense and it was something that kind of really inspired me it really made me feel like okay this guy's got the passion and he's got a plan and he's got a vision and the things that he's laying out to me aren't crazy like I know how mmo's get made I know the systems that are involved in there and he seemed like he did his research and he knew how to get there maybe not the specific technical details but he knew he knew the plan and that plan was clear and that plan is kind of what has gotten us to this point right now where where we don't spend a lot of time you know kind of dreaming right we spend a lot of our time just building and and executing on his vision and that really helps us get things done right and I think that's that's a problem a lot of startups have is they kind of don't know where they want to go or like which direction they should go and here we knew from day one exactly where when how we were gonna do it and that's that's how we got here today so if we keep doing this we're gonna have a game real soon I think so Michael tell us about your experience I think that's a question that Stephen should answer yeah I've been having in the industry since like the dawn of time yes video games were everyone like Duke Nukem and stuff yeah I did like yeah one of the Duke Nukem likely a couple of them ago when I was a kid that was like yeah the console stuff in Florida yeah so started with a startup and company in Wilsonville Oregon and then anyway so just jump from company to company company and then I was working at SOE for last ten years working on EverQuest - and did like the what was the launch pitch for the Star Wars what was it no it was the animated series game that we were working on their clitoris yeah Clone Wars so I did like the pitch for that that was the Lucas and it was fun and then yeah so that anyway they ended up splitting off those working on my own projects and and then I kind of finished the art for that and I was kind of looking for a new gig and it was I was looking for something that was kind of you know back yeah I always loved that indie sort of you know small studio very passionate you know away from like the you know the giant corporate structure we were just kind of a cog in the wheel right and you know and then of course we came in and interviewed and found that this place was you know definitely right up my alley you know I wouldn't be able to get in there and do a lot of different stuff and shape and mold you know a project you know with a bunch of passionate individuals and yeah something really amazing about Michael bacon that a lot of people may not know is here to Sarah defies gravity is that he he can concept he can model he can animate he could even design he's an amazing musician with the guitar with I mean this guy is like a Renaissance man he's like the Leonardo da Vinci he also makes his own games in a spare time that is true losers yeah absolutely I actually have one on my phone another amazing member of the team Matt Broome a legend kind of in the industry legend Matt tell us about your experience coming on board I've done a lot of stuff but the stuff you've done I'll keep this quick so it doesn't get boring spent some time at a Sony made a lot of games we did vertical pitches for Harry Potter games but the games that we put out were like I put up where h1z1 worked on Star Wars Galaxies worked on some EverQuest to worked on DC Universe Online planetside 2 EverQuest Online Adventures which at the time was the first PlayStation 2 mm OH as a revolutionary game everybody should play insanely hard to make and then came full circle and it get kind of into my experience with intrepid it was funny because I was well already work on a game with my a good friend of mine Kevin and he told me about you know this guy Steve and Sharif he's got this amazing idea he wants to make this big-ass MMO it's got everything in it and then everything has something to go along with it and I was like hmm that sounds like super super hard so as soon as I stopped throwing up in my mouth went into sat down with Stephen and to keep it short I've been with a lot of creative directors have set in a lot of rooms with people and have big world ideas Stephen is like a computer he's like a computer when you work within you get the same answer every time they see you don't see where it's written down but you get the same answer every time if he wants mounts in certain kind of mount in a certain color it's the same answer every time and in closing would also love about working at intrepid is when we're crunching you guys noticed that the founder keeps telling you stories about how he's there late into the morning I have never worked at a company this is my eighth game and the guy who owns and runs the place is side by side with you [Applause] well I got to tell you something and I think a lot of us know this when something is a passion it doesn't feel like work regardless of if you're there till 5:00 in the morning or not you are loving what you're doing and Ashes of Creation has been nothing but an absolutely just pleasure of an experience to kind of work with not only the team but the project that we're creating is is something that is exciting me a lot unbelievable yeah it's for me it's it's every month is something new and something rewarding and a lot of it comes from you guys right like we can't make this in a vacuum it doesn't exist without everybody and your responses your engagement all that stuff is kind of what keeps us going in this this crazy experiment that we're doing right now I know I've said this before but I I kid you not even if I get home at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning or whatever I still always end up going to sleep either reading the forum's like this or the discord and I fall asleep by my phone hitting my face that's usually how that happens but I mean it's all about really getting connected with the people that you're really making this game for and it's it's an awesome thing to see just here at PAX the faces it's it's one thing the words right it's another thing to see the faces playing the game playing actually Ashes of Creation this early I mean it's it's it's it's something that's awesome you know even when we went to our Kickstarter thousand dollars in our first day we didn't know and the next thing you know it's like a million dollars in the first day we're like watching that Kickstarter was insane crazy literally on the first day so I mean using a lot of people you know we going to Kickstarter wasn't about the funding honestly it was about kind of Community Development and the marketing aspect because as a lot of people know you know starting a brand new IP in an MMO genre where you know it's kind of dominated by triple-a studios big studios that have massive amounts of money to just throw a marketing you got to take it everywhere you can and Kickstarter was one of those methods so when we press that to launch that campaign I mean my hand was like trembling I was like oh my god I hope that people actually agree with what we're saying I hope that people are excited about this idea this no pay2win stuff this you know players controlling the narrative of the story and all that they just don't think these are like oh the same buzzwords I've heard of you know before because you kind of get that stigma so yeah it looked really good on paper but I didn't know if it was gonna trans resonate absolutely videos we put up like for just for internal purposes where we like post them up on like a neon account or whatever and then we would you know post them on slack just so the team could see them and then instantly the press like latched onto them could start making article darkhorse studio comes out of nowhere yeah you kind of knew right there that you had something yes even steven yes can you tell all these MMO gamers how many MMOs you play I mean I played a lot of em oh it was honestly and and I yeah I mean I've been playing MMO since I was honestly it sounds crazy I was six and a half I think I started my first one back in 1991 I didn't know that it was $6 by the hour but my mother found out the pricing structure was a little different I guess it cost my a lot of money to be on AOL at the time but never winner yeah it was my first MMO and I I've honestly I played a lot I played a lot but no that's that's helped me to define the image that I have for Ashes at creation honestly so if you know those things right like your first MMO is kind of always nostalgic and awesome right I played NRK online is my like kind of first real MMO and I always look back and I go that was the best MMO and I think a lot of people have that same story where it's that first one trying to recreate that and you keep moving from MMO MMO to kind of try to find it again that's kind of where this comes out of because we all have that picture in our heads of what an MMO could be right right and and kind of what it represents to be in a world that's filled with people who mean something to that world on so that's where this all came from is kind of that that first trying to recreate that first experience and I think that sometimes when when creating something new you want to be somewhat innovative but in the MMORPG genre a genre you also want to be somewhat traditional as well because there's a sense of nostalgia among the community that they have that first love they have that first experience and they want to recreate that so you have to kind of blend those two and they can be diametrically opposed at times right yeah definitely yeah and I think that's what you know we're doing with ashes is we have a lot of traditional feeling systems at the same time we're trying to move it forward absolutely into the country as mmo's need that right like mmo's need to evolve and and we're trying to do that is to move it forward because it's been stagnant for a little bit too long I think so I know that that we actually announced we had a special guest here unfortunately that did not work out but we do have the announcement of our special of our special guest and it actually is the musical composer for the for the game but I want to preface this by saying that when I first had the just idea of Ashes of Creation I had also the idea of who the composer would be and this is that person I'm a I'm a huge like sci-fi fan with with shows and stuff I love Star Trek I love Battlestar Galactica I also am a big fan of The Walking Dead and one of the in my opinion greatest composers that's out there right now as an individual by the name of Bear McCreary and Bear McCreary the composer for Battlestar Galactica the walking dead and a lot of other amazing things is actually the composer for Ashes of creation so you know talking about music and the score that's gonna be in ashes you know for me when I've played games in the past it's it's always that immersive quality that brings me in that takes me out of reality and puts me into this kind of fantasy world this this this suspension of disbelief is assisted by not just the visuals but by the audio the music itself having a distinct identity for a zone having a distinct identity for culture and a theme for the game those things helped me to become a part of the game really and there isn't a phenomenal composer when it comes to the conversations that we've had with him are are pretty incredible I'm really excited to start seeing what he can do with us because he is totally 100% bought into the idea of ashes I think we've turned him into a fan I got an email from yesterday it says I just want to get into the world and submerge myself in the story yeah and you know he has a lot of the story that that is not released and I think he's falling in love so yeah yeah yeah pretty cool so that that was our one of our announcements but I want to be able to also open it up a little bit for some questions yeah we want to do some questions I mean we're pretty traditional with the QA stuff and I know that there's a lot of questions out there we have a mic set up actually right there and then we also have a sorry who is a floating mic and if you guys have any questions you're welcome to step up to the mic or raise your hand and the team here is gonna answer some stuff we also got some swag that we're gonna hand out to so free stuff free swag alpha codes that's a good question we'll see we'll see about that you see you know technically I bought 50 of them that we still have to hand out all right so who's got some questions we've got a fellow up there feel free to step up give us your name and your question yes my name is John and I have not seriously played an MMO since EverQuest my question I thought about bringing a 15 minute manifesto but instead just imagine that as subtext to this question okay to what degree will soulbound equipment be featured in ashes that's a good question not a very high degree honestly the way that we're actually constructing the economy and Ashes of Creation is going to involve items that are not sold out we want the market to work off of transferable goods and actually we have hired at interpret studios a PhD economist named Rocco who is helping us to to build those systems and I think it's important that for healthy economy you have the ability to deconstruct and destroy these items and transfer these items another very important part of Ashes of Creation and what we're doing with regards to crafting of these items that are not so bound is that the economy itself is regionalised there's no global warehouse there's no global auction house you actually have to transit goods through the caravan system to region to region and that can be pretty risky yeah yeah yeah if you take a look at its sole down system right that's that's intended to pull items out of circulation right there are other ways of doing that beyond just binding it to your character so you're gonna see stuff like that in the Nationals of creation awesome thanks thank you you talk to him in line hi so my name is Heidi a little bit of my background I got started in mmo's with Altima online and then I moved to EverQuest and EverQuest to went Wow and I kind of fell out of mmo's because once EverQuest - and Wow came out it became very hard to participate in higher-level content unless you were part of a guild or consistently gaming with other players I'm antisocial online I don't want to play with other players occasionally with friends but I also have kids now so I can't do the like hardcore gaming so how accessible is Ash's going to be for someone like me who loves to play in a more casual manner and doesn't want to have to engage in large group activities okay good so there's there's two components to answering that question one is going to be the layers of community that we have available in Ash's of creation that don't necessarily involve a lot of dedication on your part you could literally log in and talk with people who are fellow citizens of a node that you're a part of who are fellow members of an organization such as the scholars Academy are thieves guilty ear part of who may be and a guild should you choose to do that who are followers of us of the same religion that you may be in and they're going to be quests that are specifically geared towards individuals of those layers of community as well as groups within those layers of communities so you're going to have a lot of solo play that's possible if you want to you know stick to yourself or you're going to be able to quickly find a group within the specific chat channels that may exist for those layers of community and it's going to be something that you can really just log in to do you don't have to have super coordinated you timed events that you can do there are going to be a lot of timed events as well for guilds and communities that are more structured than our more organized and have you know more dedicated bonds of group moonship right but we want because this is a non faction based game we want to have a lot of pseudo sort of factions where these bonds can be formed naturally within the game and that can create some rivalry some competition some some player driven content as well just to give you an example of how this might work right you are a solo player right you kind of keep yourself you log in you do your own thing but let's say you put the house down right that makes you a part of the city right now now you have ownership of your citizenship basically at that point now the city comes under attack right you have to defend it from a siege well you don't have to group up for that you don't have to talk to anybody else for that but you you still will feel ownership of it you'll still want to defend your home so you can still participate in that siege as a defender and not have to necessarily engage with anybody else I mean it's it's still possible for you to participate without having to necessarily be social it'll still be kind of a community-based event but your engagement in it is kind of your own decision so that actually brings up a follow-up question for me so if I place a house in a city and that city gets attacked and I'm not online am I going to lose my home that's a good question too so I have the mechanics that are involved with declaring a siege against nodes involve a very difficult quest that the attackers must go through first in order to obtain the item necessary to declare the siege and then there is a specific time period a window that's based off of server time localities that they can declare a siege after they've declared a siege depending on the size of the node they've declared against there's going to be a window of preparation available for the citizens of that siege to know when the impending siege is coming so for example a village stage node will see maybe three days of lead time before the siege begins after declarations been declared you'll know when that siege is going to be coming and it will be in an appropriate hour based on the time zone that the servers are part of it and if I'm watching my kids and I can't play will I lose my home it's definitely possible yes the thing is though is that we don't want to be overly penalizing right like the the reason is that you put into it the decoration effort that you've put into making it nice you can save your layouts your resources will be returned to you the kind of blueprinting and that goes on in creating that house will be returned to you okay we want these things to happen and we don't want to feel people to feel like idolized pen a lot is for that right so it's not about like we're taking it away from you you lose your citizenship along with the note but the notes not there anyway so the most important part about the CG mechanic is that the the the world is designed a lot of times in the in previous MMOs I was little hot there a lot of times in previous mmo's you will see that these sandbox style games kind of give an excuse to the developers not to create a lot of content right and that's a big no-no in my book I feel the exact opposite of that especially with Ashes of Creation being that kind of sandbox feel a little bit requires actually that you make more content than a theme park has because you don't want to just give players the illusion of choice you want to have meaningful choices that actually dictate the direction and progression of the server so we want these these shifts to happen where nodes get destroyed and brought up because each node has its own type of arcing story has its own content that when a node progresses it locks out its neighboring nodes from progressing as well so that's shift of no creation and destruction allows for new content to be experienced by everybody which means that if you do lose your home it's not going to be incredibly difficult to place it down again awesome yeah cool thank you thank you hey guys yeah so my a little bit of my background with mmo's I've played quite a few of them over the years mostly jumping around based on what my other friends are playing and then sticking around for a varying amount of time depending on how long they stick with it as well so like I've tracked Layton soul with Terra try black desert right now I'm playing Phantasy Star Online 2 but my question about that is what is your guys's stance on alt characters and was level progression going to look in relation to that and then also classes are you gonna be able to switch classes or is it one of those games where you you have to decide on one and then you gotta stick with it for a while okay so alts perfectly fine players want to have alts that's you know an amount of effort and and and time that they're devoting to actually progressing that alt so that it levels up that's fine with regards to the class progression I may have missed the middle one there the class progression is following a dark types you choose a primary archetype that gives you your primary active skills each active skill will have a subset of slots available to apply augments to augments will change the way that those active skills look and feel and some of the things that they can do so for example we've given in the past and I'm gonna talk a little bit faster so we can get as many questions as possible if I can I'm sound you're saying we've got a line yeah hopefully okay so let's say we're example you have a fighter and that fighter has a rush skill and you choose your secondary class which again is from one of those eight arc types a rogue for example that charge will charge towards target DLX damage to do some condition modifier if you take the rogue and you take his stealth augment and apply it to that rush ability then you'll go invisible upon the rush you'll keep the rush primary skill but you'll augment it to kind of adapt to the identity of that rogue archetype it won't grant you new skills or let's say you were to go with a mage our secondary class and you take the teleportation augment and you apply it to your rush then you'll teleport to your target so it kind of gives you more of a horizontal slice progression that's available from the secondary class which is a total combination of 64 classes that will be available in the game and to answer your question as far as respecting goes for the primary class we are leaning towards no on that and for the subclass we're leaning towards yes so it's it's a matter we've got to do some more experimentation with it but that's kind of what our answer would be right now if you force me to say yes thank you my name is James I really want for us to start off can tell the amount of planning that you guys have been able to do and obviously that Steven you can see how you have a lot of people who've come behind you and to support this really well-thought-out idea I've come from a background of a lot of PvP MMOs a Dark Age of Camelot was probably one of my favorite as you continue to bring on a lot of the this strong experience from a variety of backgrounds both on the music side art side design side how structured do you see your plan being and and you see it is it something that's you could really take this from now all the way till the end of the game is there probably gonna evolve a little bit over time because then the short this is your period of time you guys have really put a lot out I think that's because of the structure the plan do you be able to see yourself work at this pace continuously or is it something you're gonna have to adjust so I think one of the code now I haven't been in the industry outside of starting intrepid Studios but I will tell you that one of the reoccurring themes I hear from my developers that I bring on board is that being at Intrepid Studios and being able to produce this amount of content in the amount of time that we have really is a result of having a very specific vision and having a set parameter of what we want to build and not having to kind of explore different directions while we're building I think in the past some other you know companies will have people start in one direction and then scrap it after a period of time and started another direction and scrapped that and period time to start another direction and obviously nothing gets done they wonder why so for me yes there is a there is a defined parameter in which this game exists obviously game development is an iterative process which means that when we start the alphas and betas where our community gets to become a part and see what we're producing they will give us feedback and that feedback is obviously important because sometimes you can lose a little bit of perspective when you're so deep entrenched in something and you need an outside eye to give you an idea of what that is does that mean it's gonna change any major overarching ideas or systems in the game no I don't believe so we have that pretty set but there will be some tweaking obviously and give a shout out to epic for their Unreal Engine release things like absolutely yeah speeds up the whole process small teams you know with teeth you know so like we're constantly chomping into like you know I want to do this I'm gonna do that and it's really cool to be able to see the process of creation like when you first like concept to you know kind of creation that kind of stuff and it's it's a process that happens very quickly agreed and I was so like we're constantly just slamming stuff in the game like yeah let's do this and this and that and the move and immediately the next thing and one of the great things about having such experienced MMORPG specific artists and designers and engineers is that I can literally go to them and just say hey I got this idea can you run with it and they'll make it their own and and and they don't really have to I don't have to worry about whether or not they're gonna make it great because I know what they've done I've seen what they're capable of so I can give them that trust that's really like you go and do this thing and that's you own it like that's you know very flexible of the team so like there's a lot of things we come up and say you know our concept guy over here is like you know like Jeff you know like oh he's working on these things over here you know but can you do this you know anyways real quick and so it's not like a scenario it's like you know well you're this this is your job and this is all you do you know it's like we wear a lot of hats and we were very flexible in that regard and so because of that you know there's not a lot of bottleneck so we've constantly like branching out into like other you know areas and fields and just you know basically just taking on whatever we can and that keeps things moving and keeps things no another part of that is the atmosphere and the culture that's at the studios it's it's an extremely flat and collaborative process I mean we have a lot of people that have an unbelievable amount of experience and everybody can kind of learn from each other's experiences they work with each other they have multiple hats like Michael said so literally we don't have offices we're all on the main floor with each other literally sitting next to each other able to just roll over on that cement floor with our chairs and that's what I was gonna say though or just yell at each other that's the flat studio that we have I don't have to go to an art director of an art director to get back in to figure out where the design is going I go right over to Jeff and I get the iteration right then and I go back and I'm already working on it and we're done yeah yeah yeah I mean it's like so easy you know we're not trying to step on each other we're not trained it right you know we're just trying to make it amazing gay an amazing game thank you guys thank you thank you thank you oh wait one more wait you got once you want to think so okay that's unfair to them though I guess never long right let's go let's go to one too much so we'll take you now go ahead so I've been going midcourt a hardcore through World of Warcraft and Lich King all the way to seven Final Fantasy I'm curious what you have in terms of raid content and if not calling it rates than small group high difficulty challenges so currently our our raid side or right side our raid size will begin at 40 for our alpha testing we we intend to have massive battles I mean we want to put the massive back in massively multiplayer so and I think that that really just goes back to the identity of the MMORPG genre I mean it's about community right and you want to be existing in a community with as many of your friends as possible you want to see this massive content that you're going to be able to explore together you know and it's not necessarily that it's against the solo player but it's that if there are these large events you can go and be a part of those things they're happening in the world they are something that's necessary another huge thing about our events is going to be the triggered events that are dependent on where nodes kind of erupt in the world and and what type of experiences those create what what dark things lurk from from the shadows against those cities and come out like the dragon come from outside stuff right exactly you know the intention is to kind of have a we want to talk to all of our players right I think every well a lot of people have probably heard of the Bartle system where you've got explorers you've got adventures you've got combat people and you've got like social people right an MMO really like in my mind like are typically should be all of those things right because we're trying to create a separate world and there are tons of different types of people in those worlds so you know we want to have small group competent we want to have large group content we want to have huge rage raid content and we want all those things to be kind of opt-in where where if there is this giant dragon coming in attacking the city that those groups in those rates kind of naturally form out of that cities kind of need for defense so a lot of this stuff you're gonna see kind of more organic forming groups groups that kind of form naturally based on what's happening in the world yeah real quick if you don't mind me adding on to this so you mentioned like large scale is there anything like small group high difficulty yes yes so so the important thing about creating those large that large-scale content and also the inner dependency that Jeff was talking about between the different sizes of and types of players that are in the game is that you want to have something that it can be done for each event that kind of relates to the different types of players who are playing the game right so for example you have like a castle siege that's going to include these large guilds going against each other you're going to have these kind of mini occurrences that are within the castle siege that may only involve a small group but there may have solo players capable to influence something in the siege so there are things to do kind of for the solo to the raid size and in between and if you come by our our booth we have an example of that small group content yeah we do high so I mostly just came here because I I saw in the program and I it was an MMO you raise a lot of money on Kickstarter you must have promised something or or been about something that was very different than people something needed in the industry so for other people that might be a bit like me and here could you give like a high level overview of the things you're most excited about that you feel are different than the standard MMO and just a quick yes or no question do you have a mathematician do we have a mathematician yes so I you mentioned you have an economist and I've seen a lot of games they spent a lot of time iterating on simple balance issues that could be solved by someone who did looked at the equation and said yeah that's not balance but we don't have a mathematician specifically but we're all pretty confident with math we have yes guys who are you know pretty familiar yeah absolutely no linear algebra they know right you know that they're pretty advanced yeah I see their books on their desk yeah they look at them and I'm like what is that it's just it's just arcane similarly they bring things in other words a lot of Greek [Music] to give a real quick overview you know something that's very specifically different about Ashes of Creation is is is putting the agency over the narrative in the hands of the players so when you enter the world there is no existing static NPC structure you're going to move into the wilderness and there's going to be these nodes that exist with these zones of influence that apply to each node and as players move around and hotspot the activity in the world the nodes are gonna be collecting experience from normal activities that players do such as killing monsters to inquest gathering building homes all those different things when a node collects enough experience it's gonna threshold to one of six stages as it progresses down those six stages are going to see NPCs appear you're gonna see a camp a village a town a city eventually a metropolis at every stage is going to be unlocking new content that's specific to the location of that note so players are going to be able to build literally cities up from the ground and then they're also going to be able to destroy them to pave new common pavement pave the way for new content notes specifically when they get advanced in stages disabled nearby nodes so you are literally locking out content that's available and players are going to have to build this up each server is going to experience a different history each server is going to have a different story told cool quick I'm sorry I press that's the first time I've said that so you've stated before that your most important system and the most players interact with is the combat system which is what my questions about you've recently added the combat minigame bar mmm feels comfortable on a mage at first my reaction was I hated it but the randomness and the mage feels at home on the melee classes not so much how set in stone were you guys on the mini-game and are you gonna carry it over to all classes or I'm for instance on a melee class were you thinking about maybe doing something a little different so let me give a pretty in-depth overview on the QuickTime event that's been associated with the number one skill in the combat ya know is the combo system also known as the combo or precision system so specifically I do believe it is correct that combat is it is is one of the most important aspects of an MMORPG obviously making it feel fluid making it feel comfortable because it's something that you do very often the reason that we added the QuickTime event was because we didn't want to have an auto attack feature the QuickTime event doesn't apply to all skills as a matter of fact it only applies to one skill and it generates what we call focus and focus as an alternative energy source that can fuel certain types of skills so instead of using your auto attack you're using your primary weapon skill in this weapon skill is a progression path win in and of itself you have your normal skill tree that you have with your assigned class but then each weapon has a progression tree as well and that progression tree allows you to add specific types of conditions that will be prompt when you hit a combo in the purchasing system in the combo system now the huge thing about QuickTime events obviously is going to be the interaction with your eyes and the UI and right now our UI is pre-alpha it it's very early and part of making that more intuitive intuitive is obviously going to be an iterative protective process between developing further the UI and then getting players adjusted to that kind of quick time event your question are we set in stone on the QuickTime event well it's something that we'd like to have in our testing phases obviously to get better input I think that there was a lot of initially when we released and showed that there was a lot of like oh I don't want the QuickTime event but all of the reactions almost all of the reactions we've been receiving from people who have been participating in the demo here at PAX has been extremely positive and they've liked it so I think that part of giving feedback is actually having a hands on experience and then when that hands-on experience is happened you have the feedback to give we're gonna be taking it yeah like the melee obviously has problems because people are always that ranging you yes and the animations for the melee are really fast so those are things are gonna be adjusted over time and kind of will finding the sweet spot on them you know it's it this is not a finished product by any means and we're just gonna try and make it better more fluid right now it feels pretty good on two of the classes and it'll continue to get better as we progress so and I will say one other thing you know part of the process that we're adopting as a studios is having that very very very transparent window in our development that we're literally at PAX showing a pre-alpha build which I don't think really gets done very much but the reason we're doing it is because we want the community to see what's going on with production we want them to see the progress we're making we want to have that dialogue we have an obligation to you right like you guys are the ones who made this possible so we're obligated to share these things with you and we might share it warts and all and we expect that back and we want that feedback and we appreciate that absolutely I mean if everybody said hey your conv system sucks you know I think we would probably get rid of it if you're gonna like it you're gonna eat it like now thank you thank you thank you okay hi so as someone who's played a lot of Wow and has like like 16 or something max level characters that I'm doing end game content on just how friendly are you guys looking at being how what salt friendly like how many times am I gonna have to do and game and locks on different characters and game and loss I mean it's gonna depend on what your character is right and what your goals are as a player right right it's an game rating gear isn't gonna be necessary to proceed your castle right it's not gonna be necessary to hang out in a bar and play your loot it's not gonna be necessary to go out and craft your escort a caravan so there's all sorts of different things that you can do in this game that don't involve in-game rating and there are no account locks on gear or items or specific quests or things like that I mean if you're developing a new character an alternate character you know that progression path is an individual progression path though it sounds yeah I'm happy I'm absolutely okay thank you endgame is a terrible word endgame is a bad word and I'm gonna tell you right now that in Ashes of Creation we've steered as far away as possible from an endgame type of idea because the world is ever changing so there's always going to be story arcs that they get revealed at a later date and then because we're also subscription-based game with absolutely zero whatsoever pay to win that we are going to be releasing constant content on a monthly basis as well as a quarterly basis that ties into the to the construction of the world yep yeah so before my question I like the combo system but can I please move it and make it transparent yeah absolutely the UI will be extremely customizable both in size in position and type of UI you could see if you want to change the bar to a circle you change the circle we want to have a very adaptable movable and customizable UI so yeah so my question is gonna have a two part what kind of skill cap are you looking for I know there's a wide range of players but as far as like is it gonna be like easy to learn hard to master or just kind of just a consistent smooth progress all right it's a good question so real quick I don't think I've ever really gone into this in detail before so hold on to your seat oh god oh god so my in when I envisioned the skill tree I see a combination of both action oriented skills and tab targetable skills and having a obviously movement positioning matter in both of those but I see players capable of customizing their skilled choices whether they want to be more geared toward tabs targeting or more geared towards action-oriented combat and having that choice in the skill tree so when you talk about skill level you know obviously you have to balance between skills that require a higher skill level and what type of damage output that has what type of condition modifiers they can do compared to a skill that you can just have target and use a function on right so having that balance between those two things but also giving agency to the player to kind of customize their play experience towards one or the other is something that I think we're going to do pretty well in ashes yep I mean we're trying to go for a pretty like high skill floor right where where even the worst player can contribute yes and not that anybody's bad at playing here but but we want we want people to play the game we want people to have fun playing the game and when you get a like a really complicated complex system where you have to worry about a whole lot of different situations like that's tough for some people um so we want to make sure that that the entry is pretty easy and then we want a pretty decently high place where people can kind of experiment with different types of play styles at the same time so so skill will matter yes it's going matter but you'll be able to kind of customize your experience towards either a higher skill end of it or a lower skill end of it I think yeah yeah I know that you can have huge groups decide things in the game but have you ever considered like maybe a side quest like they can affect how City builds but if somebody finds a small quest they can do it on the side to you know change the path or to something else like a one-off kind of quests so we have we have two types of real quest lines as they relate to players reven I didn't no no not quest types - quest lines so we have an overarching meta-narrative that involves the world and then we have those related to the individual and groups right the types then yes I'm today you could say that three types of you like so the three types of quests are tasks events and narrative so tasks are a little kind of more incidental quest like if I'm gonna go send you out to kill five wolves right do I need to actually tell you a story about that I don't really need to set a give a designer you know a week's worth of work to figure out how to make five wolves killing five wolves interesting right if we just create the story out of what's happening in the game then I don't need to write that I can just let it happen and and players will create that story in their head so if those five wolves are killing your livestock you need to deal with those wolves in order to protect your livestock so there's a story right there that I don't have to write so tasks are generally these smaller sort of quests that kind of affect the noted as a whole that have that have consequences that can be either successful or failure right so if you fail to kill those wolves they'll continue wrecking your livestock and that'll reduce the amount of stuff that your farm is generating so so we want everything to have consequences we don't necessarily want to necessarily write a lot about that that's where we want to focus on the narrative that's where we're gonna focus most of our are kind of like writing design work is going to be on telling the story of the world and not these little you know tiny stories that are kind of more filler than anything else we still think that are important they're important for content they're important for people to have things to do during the day but but yeah I don't know if I'm actually answering that question at all I'm sorry I got too excited yeah sorry about I was gonna answer that girls but that's fine hello I'm Connor or tail teller on the forums and I would like to ask from the community to great sentinels or guild and Ashes of Creation you have the cleric in the summoner and we know that the cleric is a master of life and death if you combine the two will you have a necromancer so what I will say is this that our 64 class list will be coming out soon trademarked and and there will be a necromancer in that class list yes I won't say what it is though and how many times did you play the PvP because this guy looks like he was an employee [Laughter] one quick question um if you delve too greedily and too deep into a mind will something awaken in the darkness it's absolutely possible you've got to be careful what it has thank you thank you alright hi my name is Kai from the discord shout out to Rivi and como and tuk for this question what is the world's name question we voted on it so they kind of want an answer okay it I don't know if we're ready for this we're ready say I feel like we've built it up to me I know I'm really scared okay so let me preface this with the fact that many cultures have a different name for the world yeah there is a general common tongue name for the world in Ashes of Creation that you're coming back to and I don't know [Applause] come on all right it's like Oh hold on wait another important thing about ashes at creation is that I want to make sure that this story is something you get to experience and isn't spoiled before you get into the game but okay the name of the world in Ashes of Creation oh my gosh okay the name of the world in Ashes of Creation is Vera ve r ra [Applause] scripted thank you you're very welcome are you okay Jeff all right I'm gonna take one more question and then we're gonna we're gonna get kicked out probably so all right so this questions from one of my guild members about alchemy how do you feel about that and then also is there anything you can make to be like permanent boosts to an individual they can like put on your arm or hold around to boost anything yes so the second part of the question other are there permanent augments that you can apply to your character to augment and they like stat and stuff like that if anything well there's the tattoos well I guess not permanent cuz you could remove it yeah the tattoo system could be something yeah yeah yeah and then also you know armor sets that up like that what was the first question the first question is what do we think about alchemy we think it's pretty cool I do it regularly good question we'll all right guys alchemy you're gonna have there it's one of the professions that you're gonna be able to explore in your artisan tree that's going to give you the ability to kind of create these cocktails these potions these these basically aids that can assist in either granting temporary buffs or revealing certain types of things and anybody that didn't get their question answer just swing by our booth we're all working the booths so we're answering questions all day long all date tomorrow too so absolutely and guys I want to reiterate again that it is an absolute pleasure and honor to see the type of enthusiasm and excitement that's going into this from the community you don't understand the smiles that you put on our faces at the studios every time we release anything about Ashes of Creation to see your guys's involvement in this to give us your feedback the passion that you're putting into it honestly makes our days possible we feel really really really lucky yes thank you thank you guys alright see you at the booth Oh Oh alpha