Talk:2020-07-19 Steven Sharif Interview - Asmongold

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what do you think dude if this game comes out yeah with everything that's been promised and it's polished wow it's done all right here we go boys yeah okay man how's my how's my sound quality by the way i'm on my phone driving to vegas and i'm like in the middle of the desert surprisingly better than most streamers who make it a career to have their song quality be pretty good okay perfect um well i wanted to say thank you very much for coming on and talking to us about this uh i mean i think we all really appreciate it i mean like you i i heard a little bit of your story about how you were kind of an mmo player who's been uh you know as many of us a little bit maybe felt a little bit neglected and you thought about going your own way and so this is uh this is something you've been working on how long have you been working on the project for so yeah actually you know i started my first mmorpg as a as a kid at seven years old when it was like 1992 six dollars by the hour to play on aol it was never winter the first never winter oh boy yeah since then you know i played pretty much every mmo out of the box and you know the story for intrepid and ashes of creation really stemmed from my last mmo that i was playing pretty heavily which was archeage about six seven years ago about six years ago and uh i really loved that game like i felt it had a lot of great potential and i just got really fed up and upset with you know some of the design decisions and and let me know if i'm cutting out by the way but it'll probably be off and on it'll be all right yeah some of the design decisions really just kind of took me off and um you know i had a very large guild in that game and i've had a large guild since i was one of my favorite mmos i played back in like 2003 for many years was lineage 2. a lot of inspiration i have for ashes comes from like lineage 2 arcade a lot of people brought that up actually yeah i thought lineage 2 was a great game i really like non-faction based games that you know leave kind of the the you know player agency to determine your friends and foes to the player um so so essentially you know i was in san diego and san diego is a great hotbed for developers you know we have a lot of studios around us we had sony online entertainment which became daybreak we had you know blizzard in irvine we had a you know amazon game studio and stuff so um you know i'm a pretty big tabletop gamer as well i love playing like warhammer fantasy and where i'm at 40k and a lot of the guys from sony would play at my game shop and you know i was i was retired at like 29 and when i was fed up with archeage and i said to these guys i was like hey what do you think about making an mmorpg like i'll fund it let's try to hire a bunch of people and see what we can do so you know we started like 2015 2016 kind of white papering out all of the designs that i had for ashes you know all the different systems that exist and uh about 2017 we went to kickstarter not really as a means for funding you know i'm personally funding the entire project but actually to you know add some additional features but also mainly to get a a litmus test on what the community thinks about many of our designs to see if there's a demand exactly yeah essentially to test these this design theory because as you know and a lot of mmo players know you know there's been this kind of a paradigm shift towards a mentality of everybody's a winner and there's no longer a risk versus reward type of design philosophy and yes we've heard of that and that's i can't stand that i mean it it makes me it really undermines what the genre was meant to be and that doesn't go to say that there shouldn't be systems that are made for casual players and systems that are made for for hardware players you should have a diversity of progression paths but um you know i really got upset with that so we wanted to make sure that these ideas resonated with the mmorpg genre and that's um you know what we did with kickstarter was very successful and that's when we started to really ramp up in the number of developers and and the size of the studio and really started making significant progress in production so we've been in production now for about three years ever since kickstarter um and you know we have over 60 over 65 developers that are here in san diego with some that are you know outside elsewhere in in the world and then we're ramping up right now we just launched another hiring phase with uh 24 positions available at the studio that we're promoting so whenever you're talking about the kickstarter and the kind of feedback that you guys have gotten is there any specific feature in the game that was actually kind of thought of by people in the kickstarter or are these just kind of all ideas that you've come up with and just different people have enabled them to happen yeah there really really wasn't ideas that we took so to speak from a system or mechanics standpoint from kickstarter all of these designs are you know essentially designs that i created as as kind of inspiration from the many mmorpgs that i played in the past each of which you know contains some you know reference to maybe a system that is in ashes that i thought did well and i just thought why not combine all of these systems together into a game that represents a wide array of player ability to kind of focus in the direction and progress in a direction that they want like blizzard on crack dude yeah exactly i mean that that's something that we're obviously we still you know providing a truly pbx kind of experience yeah i mean that's one thing that i i was really kind of excited to see and this is something that i really liked about classic wow for example is that you had people who basically their endgame was doing professions and with bdo you had kind of the same thing where you had players that were pvpers and pvers and then you also had people that were working inside of the community of the game kind of like kind of carving out their own gameplay experience and i feel like professions are playing a very big role in ashes of creation am i kind of right about that i've seen a lot of stuff about it yeah so the profession system is is intrinsically tied to what is called our artisanship system so the artisanship system really contains three branches of focus okay gathering processing and crafting essentially the gathering is focused really around the the blacksmithing profession your ability to craft tools that essentially uh better your ability to collect raw resources in the world to harvest them um they grant you access to higher grade resources they increase the chances of procking uh rare materials are out of uh excuse me rare resources out of uh the harvesting nodes and then the processing is based kind of around your freehold system with essentially establishing uh the infrastructure for processing those things on your freehold parcel uh and that's like building blueprints of smelters or of stables for the animal husbandry profession that kind of thing it's kind of like middle professions right exactly and once you process those raw gatherables into uh craftable materials that's when the crafters come online and their main focus is to acquire recipes there are limited uses to recipes the more rare the recipe is and there are and that's tied intrinsically into node progression so as nodes get higher stages it unlocks crafting stations that can be constructed so that the crafters who get their processed goods from the processors who get their raw materials from the gatherers are able to complete a finished product so there's like a it's an assembly line effectively right exactly the key to making a successful crafting system is is including interdependencies that exist within the system that people are required to excel and progress in in order to facilitate that assembly line yeah i totally agree with that i think that's one of the best things about the game it's one of the uh the things that i've kind of disliked about wow is the fact that people can kind of do everything all by themselves but how many professions can you have you can only be an artisan in one profession at a time is that right so as you progress in one of the three branches of the artisanship system with your um with your gathering processing or crafting abilities it unlocks access to cert certain professions that then you have a secondary progression path and based off of your performance in in creating that profession's uh specialty so think of it like a tree the higher you go up the tree the taller the branches that you have access to those branches are essentially the professions okay that makes sense and so i did see one element of it that i was a little bit uh i'm actually curious about how you're gonna be able to balance this and that the profession gear is going to be equivalent to the rating gear right so essentially the crafted gear is going to be on par with what legendary drops will be and the way you kind of accomplish that is you know the drop tables that exist for world bosses or dungeon bosses they have a uh uh uh rng chance of dropping completed i yes you know complete totally finished items however they have a higher chance of dropping material components that are necessary and uh unique recipes that are necessary in crafting those uh those on par gear so yeah so the idea is as you're completing this content you're not only fueling the opportunity through the drop table system to acquire completed boss gear but you're also adding additional materials that go into uh supplying the master artisans with the ability to craft this gear as well did you ever play uh classic wow yeah i played classic wow i really honestly i really honestly didn't get into wow too much and the reason why is because wow launched around the same time as uh lineage two and you know i really just wasn't a huge fan of the faction-based system you know often times i found myself disliking my own faction more than i disliked the enemy faction i was told to fight yeah i can do it i kind of you know felt in lineage there was an opportunity there to more have more guild driven politics more player driven interactions and i kind of got hooked on lineage in that regard so i didn't play well a lot no i can i can understand that i think that the same dynamic happened in black desert and i can totally understand it it was really fun in there too so like for example with the profession gear let's say you kill a dragon and the dragon can drop a dragon tooth but you can also get dragon scales from the dragon and you use the dragon scales to cra craft like a shield or something absolutely correct so there's going to be multiple material components that are capable of being dropped from each robot center dungeon boss and those components will relate to a specific type of craftable gear okay and that's where the high level craftable gear comes from and these high-level uh bosses and these like world bosses and everything these are all in instant content uh the highest level so not not all of them um there are some that are more story related that get instanced but 80 of the content that will exist in ashes of creation is open world and there's a specific reason for that so because of the way that friendships and or and or enemies are forged in the game and people have the opportunity to create or you know their own friends or foes we want that to play out from a contesting standpoint as well so a lot of these hunting grounds or raid bosses that people are going to have opportunities to kill uh they're going to be essentially contested potentially by your your enemies that you've created in the game or you can work together to create alliances in order to defend those those contested zones oh yeah we have that now in classic wow it's very uh very dramatic driven but it's also very social it is extremely social and that's a big positive absolutely i mean the social component of what mmorpgs as a genre are supposed to be have kind of been lost over the years in my opinion over the past decade as many of the designs are more related to to essentially creating these safe spaces for players which don't create a lot of soft friction and and i don't like the idea of that i think soft friction is an important component of making people emotionally invested in the outcome of events in games that's an important part of why we play games and some of the best experiences that i've had as an mmorpg gamer have been not related around the curated content by the designers but instead by the unpredictable player driven encounters that you know nobody could have predicted like i remember in archeage you know i had a great time my guild was fighting almost the entire server and we had literally and i'm not i'm not exaggerating here we had a 24 straight hour fight where i went to bed in the middle of the fight for like three hours and i and i got back up and got back into the command chair and it was all over the crack and raid boss that the server was trying to prevent us from doing and that i mean those types of events live with you i mean yes they're they're gated around the content but they're player driven events so i guess probably that that experience is what caused you to have the sieges be it dedicated times during the day yeah so i think it's important that you know for players we i mean we work hard so that we can have the free time to come and enjoy you know what we like with mmorpgs and it kind of sucks if you know somebody can sneak in at castle siege at 2 a.m in the morning and you know you're not up and your friends are up and that's a really shitty experience so you know kind of the way we're going to structure the uh the server shards is essentially when you come into the game you're going to have a time zone that's appropriate next to your server that you choose and that's going to reflect essentially the windows in which some of these key systems can operate so like say for example you want to declare a siege against a node you'll complete that quest to get the speed scroll when you get that seed scroll the applicable time that you can declare the siege will be between you know 3 p.m and 7 p.m eastern time if you're an eastern surfer right yeah okay well that makes a lot of sense i think that's probably the smartest and best way to do it for the same reasons that you mentioned too uh so whenever you're talking about like this pve content like what's kind of the difficulty level of that content and how will it is like is the game meant to be like with world of warcraft nowadays there's a heavy emphasis on like content that's very challenging and very hard is that something that you're really looking to emulate in ashes of creation or is it just gonna be mainly a social experience with difficulty that's kind of created primarily through the friction of other players well i think so a hundred percent our our objective on the pve front is to create encounters that that have varying degrees of difficulty that are determined by your performance as a raid or group so essentially um as you're progressing through let's say a raid environment a dungeon and you're beating the first and second and third boss before you get to the final boss your performance at those stages will dictate the ai's performance against you at each subsequent phase that's kind of the idea behind the varying difficulties now based on your performance and the varying degrees of difficulty will also influence the drop tables that are used when you complete that content as well so the better you do the better opportunity you'll have from a gear and drop standpoint um also now okay that's super that's super important because one of the primary driving forces that i've experienced as a gamer in mmorpgs is that gear chase and the reason people have a gear chase comes down to performance essentially right yes and that performance can either be dictated by your pvp experiences whether that be castle sieges or group pv whatever or it's dictated by the ability and drive for you to complete content at a degree in which you have to to get the benefits that you want right so we want to make sure that there's that there is difficulty that's reflective of the desire to get best in slot items and that's a very important component so like for example let's say you do the first boss and if you kill the first boss within 30 seconds then the second boss gains more health and it drops better gear and if you feel the second boss within 30 seconds then the third boss is even stronger is that kind of so okay that's that's sort of that's a very simplistic way to look at it i would say that is that is accurate to a principal standpoint but really what happens is our bosses have specific ai behavior trees and blackboards that they use in order to determine the types of skills that they're going to show during an encounter the type of thresholds on their health pool that instigate either rage mechanics or different types of environmental hazards and strategies that become online all of those things are kind of predicated in an overarching ai manager for an encounter like let's say that that dungeon where you described hey i killed the first boss in x amount of time now the second boss is ai behavior tree number three on the scale or number five you know it kind of increases so it's dynamic difficulty in that way exactly okay and does this does it also scale with the amount of players so like for example if you go in there with i think the uh the numbers were 8 16 and 40. are you encountering the same bosses at eight players as you are with 40 or are there certain con certain bits of content in the world that are exclusive basically for large groups like 40 and above so we're not going to be incorporating scaling into the encounters and the ai essentially you're going to have designated encounters that are intended for 40 man groups you're going to have designated content for party groups elite monsters and then you're gonna have designated solo encounters right um the idea there you know i'm not a huge fan of scaling i think that kind of diminishes i think it diminishes your achievements and if you're always fighting the same difficulty level it's a monotonous experience and it kind of sucks so um you know that's that's why we have statically designated types of of content and so that actually leads me to another question i have with leveling so whenever you're leveling out in the world uh the time frame that they gave and uh that lazy peon gave was 45 days uh playing six to uh four to six hours a day is that accurate or where would you kind of expect it to lie yeah i'm always hesitant to you know yeah to have answered that in the past because i don't want to give people the wrong impression but i would say this safely a lot of games are are built around very fast uh uh progression and you know our our philosophy is there are many different progression paths not everything is tied to your adventuring class and leveling your adventuring class there's advancement within societies of nodes there's the advancement of the nodes itself there's the advancement of your artisanship classes and gatherables there's advancement within the religion system there's advancement that is in exploration there's a lot of different things that players can do to progress so it kind of uh you know to kind of tie it all back to just the adventuring class and being able to get max level in a week that's not going to be ashes of creation ashes of creation on the adventuring class side will require some substantive dedication in order to to level up you know we want to get back to that more nostalgic kind of design philosophy where your your investment in your character is meaningful and not everybody is going to get a participation reward well that's certainly a a relief and whenever you're leveling up so you're going from like there are zones that are for instance level 20 zones that if you go to level 30 those mobs are still level 20 and if you go there at level 10 the mobs are still also level 20. so actually there's a unique component you know the biggest thing that sets ash's creation apart from pretty much every mmo that's come before it is that as nodes you know nodes are the primary world building mechanic in the game you go throughout the world you do your normal mmo things you kill monsters you do quest lines you gather goods whatever as you're doing that you're collecting that experience and you're in a node somewhere collecting that experience as well and as the node advances in stages at each stage it's actually changing the spawn tables around it so you have dedicated points of interest that exist around each of the node locations and as the node advances it advances the level of the mobs in certain locations so that those areas remain relevant one of the biggest problems that mmo's you know have that i've experienced in the past and the reason one of partially one of the reasons why i wanted this system in place is because you always have these starting areas that were empty worthless and had no relevance after an initial launch right or a new expansion loss and that's kind of one of the intrinsic problems with mmos it appears to be like from a new player acquisition point mmos don't typically fare well from a retention standpoint they tend to fare better than most um so how can we kind of solve that problem one of the ideas i had was with the node progressing and unlocking new content that maintains relevancy of those zones so that new players come back and the reason why it's important excuse me players level players come back and the reason why that's important is because one of the problems of a new player joining an existing mmo is there's no social experience because of those everybody's always backstage nobody's there to exactly so one of the ways we kind of solve that is if the primary source of new content is the node system then you're always going to have these nodes that exist near the starting areas for players to kind of uh get introduced into society's religions and guilds and whatnot and still have the relevant monsters and quest lines for them to progress but there's going to be uh uh you know higher level end game characters that are present at the node as well for them to get inducted into you know guilds or whatever so like for example i i don't know like how close this is but i'll give you like a scenario and just let me know if this is you know if i'm hot or cold here so like imagine there's like a mountain and then if you're mining in the mountain eventually you start finding you know small uh little like fire salamanders and then you you know advance your note a little bit farther and now you're seeing you know medium-sized drakes and then you announce advance your note even further and then there's an actual dragon inside of the node is that pretty much how it works not only that but it's a little bit better as well because um the way we spawn nodes in real time as we as those assets come online sorry about that i was getting a call as as the notes come online um points of interest start to manifest as well so you might be mining at that node fighting a little fire salamander and that fire salamander might stay there when the node progresses but next to the mine you were mining a dungeon has now appeared basically the entrance has opened up because some archaeologists are attracted to the stage three node right and now that dungeon has relevant content for higher level people so you as and the content that you're experiencing with the little fire salamander might remain but as the as the spawn tables progress and points of interest start to come online for content now new players are going to come and be attracted to that to that stuff yes yeah that sounds really good and there's one thing that you said too that did kind of spark my interest uh there are religions in this game is that right that's correct there are six primary religions as well as an under as an underwhelmed religion uh that players can progress in and religions societies like the scholars academy thieves guild they all have progression in rank and title so as players uh uh essentially players have to choose which religion they're going to be a part of they have to choose which society they're going to be a part of they choose which guild they're going to be part of as you choose those things there is progression within the those societies that are quest-based as well as objective-based so essentially like you know the thieves guild may want a specific book from the scholars academy and your node is a patron node of the thieves guild so that's the only society it has available to it you're a member of that thieves guild you receive an objective that many players receive as well to steal the book from a nearby node from their scholar academy building scholar academy buildings are going to be flagged to kind of encounter and see you and they can try to stop you but if you're successful you get experience and you also get a notoriety within the organization that grants you access to special shops titles and abilities that come online during either node sieges or different types of events so are these different religions i mean i'm sure there's a real life parallel to this as well but are these different religions and uh and guilds not necessarily guilds but like different organizations like the thieves guild and everything like that are these going to be put at odds with each other through mechanics in the game like via pvp or is it just kind of something that plays out narratively so the guilds will have the opportunity to be at odds with one another through the guild wars system but they'll also have the ability to be friends with each other through the alliance system the societies which are more npc driven those will have those will be predicated on the relationship your node has with surrounding nodes so part of the mayoral duties is to maintain diplomatic relations with nearby nodes and that flags the citizens you can only ever be a citizen of one node and that flags the citizens uh as either being at odds with the citizens of a nearby node depending on that diplomacy or allies of the nearby node citizenship so you could either be flagged for battle for a period of time if there's a war or you can participate with one another in certain events so the way that relates to those societies is based on that diplomatic relation that's set by the mayor you can have either cooperative quest lines that introduce players of other organizations or you'll have adversarial quest lines such as the stealing of the book that i described before okay that makes a lot of sense and so basically all of the um all of the kind of forced hostility like where you see another player and they're hostile toward you to you and you can attack them uh all of that is opt-in like you opt in to make the decision like who you're hostile with yeah that's correct so there's no there's no forced hostility so essentially the opt-in can be delegated either to uh leaders or to the individual essentially let's say you're a part of a node as a citizen and the mayor decides that they want to go to war i don't know how this happened but my seat cushion heater got turned on i was wondering why i was like firing up oh shit i was like it's like 120 degrees outside and i'm burning yeah it's the wrong time if you're in las vegas um no to answer your question it's a it's an opt-in system um sometimes that opt-in is delegated to leaders like the mayor or your guild leader but essentially you will always have the option to uh to leave either that organization if you don't agree with the leadership or to vote them out through the election system of the of the mayorship systems yeah that's something that you know as a streamer i'm worried if they're going to vote for me or to vote me out i'm certainly curious about that the cool thing about the node system and its government stuff is that there's four there's four types of nodes essentially there is the democratic type which is called our scientific node type that's that's where the election method is by by voting uh there's the military type where players receive a champion upon becoming a citizen and they can level that champion up through doing quest lines and they can grant the champion gear and then they participate in gladiatorial arenas to see who the victor is and that victor becomes the mayor the divine node types have a quest based kind of merit system where the more questing you do for the temple of the node uh the uh the like more likely you are to become mayor at the end of the election cycle and then the economic system is more an oligarchy kind uh where uh you contribute resources and gold uh to essentially bid for the highest bidder to become the mayor so not always is it going to be through popularity contest that's really just i love that scientific system i think that's really good feature because you're going to have some people that can just uh you know like if you have like let's say one guild that's completely dominant on the server you're gonna know that these people are always going to be in charge but if there's different paths to progression that kind of makes it at least a lot harder for that to happen so that's right and not only is it absolutely and not only is it harder but you know i've always found in games that have non-faction based more grilled guild driven dynamics that having a very powerful guild on the server is really almost always temporary and either there's infighting that occurs or internal politics between the alliances or some other guild rises to fight and i think that's kind of it it replicates that dynamic of good versus evil type struggle where people become invested now obviously if the mechanics and systems of a game are built in such a way that they do not provide some rails to how far a dominant guild can go to ruin the experience for others then it's a bad design theory but if if the designs are maintained in such a way such as in ashes of creation where there is success that's demonstrably uh uh recognized through the advancement of that particular guild but you can't go as far as to ruin the game for other players so to speak you can definitely manifest your power but you can't just at every end stop progression for other players that's an important inclusion in an open world type uh that leads into the whole corruption mechanic right yeah and so the way that works my understanding is that it's kind of like the more that you basically kill other players the more hostile you become towards the not only other players in general but also towards the uh npcs as well right so you know i took a lot of inspiration for the open world flagging mechanics from lineage 2 i thought that lineage 2 did a great job in balancing both allowing the agency for players to kind of make rash decisions out of either you know extreme anger or whatever as long as there's a downside so the corruption mechanic is really designed in a way like if you see somebody out there and you just hate this person and they've done something to you that's wrong or they betrayed your guild and dropped with some boss loot or whatever you know the standard you know drama that happens in mmos that makes it fun yes and you want to kill that person you know you have the he's still in call he's driving so as long as you understand that it's a kaizen because there is normal yeah sorry go ahead oh no uh you just cut out for a couple of seconds sorry i was just letting you know sorry about that so um yeah the corruption system so basically the way it works is there's a standard death penalty and that death penalty uh allows you to upon death acquire a debt experience and that debt experience can impact your normal gameplay by either diminishing some of the power of your skills if you accrue too much and and the normal death penalty that you accrue is actually halved if you fight back so if you're rolling up on a person and they're not flagged and you're not flagged you can attack them you will become a combatant they will still be a non-combatant if they fight back and they die as a combatant you lose half of the normal death penalties you would normally lose so we're incentivizing consensual pvp if the player were to kill you and you did not flag back you didn't fight back and you were still you were still a non-combatant they're gonna gain a corruption score and that corruption score multiplies their normal death penalties by four times it also increases the it also adds the opportunity for them to drop completed gear upon death and it flags them for the bounty hunter system so basically their character they drop gear from their character that's correct yes so they can drop equipped gear if they're corrupt now that's a conscious decision that that player is making to become corrupt though so it's a again you have to weigh the the cost-benefit ratio there and the idea is that if you gain too much corruption meaning you try to turn into either a pk character or something along those lines you're going to be eventually at some point you're going to be combat ineffective not only are you going to potentially lose your gear significantly more but you'll also have less less impact from combat uh skill uh percentage standpoint um and then additionally for corrupt players there's two ways that you can essentially lose that corruption when you die you lose a significant portion of the corruption if you um if you go and you hunt and you gain experience that starts to diminish the corruption you have as well so at that point it becomes kind of a cat and mouse game because you're present on the map for bounty hunters and because there's limited fast travel in the game kind of really just determined by by metropolis they're gonna have to travel out to you and you're not gonna be very easily able to to to you know scroll back to town so to speak as you would in other games um so that cat and mouse relationship provides benefits to the bounty hunter if they successfully kill corrupt players but it also allows the corrupt player to fight back against the bounty hunter and the bounty hunter is always flagged against the corrupt player so the the corrupt player can fight back and kill the bounty hunter without additional uh detriment so it's like yeah it's a cat and mouse game okay well that's pretty interesting is there so you have to do a lot of pking to start actually losing uh this kind of uh this stuff right like your your combat right yeah not only is there do you have to do a lot of pecans that are con that are consecutive but if you have a number of pks on your record without going through you know we haven't really described this to the community yet but there is a method by which you can lower your previous pk count so that it doesn't exacerbate the next amount of of corruption you gain from the system but uh corruption you also gain more if you have a lot of previous pks as well so it's a cumulative it's like a karma system almost right okay and so you do have like guild sieges and all that kind of stuff and all of that is completely outside of the corruption system because it's consistent right the corruption system only applies to open world flagging all pvp events that are contained within optins systems such as castle sieges node sieges caravan uh caravan fights uh guild wars and node wars those are all self-contained within specific systems that don't utilize the flagging system and do not utilize the corruption system those those are where you automatically become combatants against um the the uh the player uh pool for the defense or the attacking side and so uh going over to like the way the housing works the freeholds effectively are just player housing out in the open world is that right right so there's three there yeah there's three types of housing there's an endnote static housing which are open world housings that are you know they come online with each advancement of the node there's apartment systems which are instance housing that essentially um you know you must own a house uh within a node zone of influence or within a node before you can become a citizen of the node so those instance apartments kind of grant the ability for players to become citizens of those nodes they're statically there's some that start but then also player mayors get to elect construction sites which are public work projects that the citizens can participate in they can grant you know resources to those buildings and he can construct additional apartment buildings he can construct advanced crafting stations he can construct the diplomatic buildings marketplaces auctions all depends um but the then the player housing the third type is the freehold system and the freehold system is one per account uh it grants you a large parcel of land which you must then collect blueprints for and then collect resources to build uh those those uh buildings and that's really kind of the processing plant of each player they'll be able to take raw resources that they either purchase from other people or that they acquire themselves and they'll be able to process them into material goods that can be then used for um for crafting is there going to be something like a effectively guild freehold like something larger like a castle correct so at a so guilds advance and level and the way guilds advance in level is through specific quest lines that are attributed to the guild members that they must participate in and or achievements that the guild can achieve when they advance in level the guild has the opportunity to allocate guild skill points in their skill tree to either allowing them to include additional membership or to focusing passive abilities that the guild members can have as a benefit of being in the guild so essentially what that allows is guilds can either be more focused into kind of elite teams that are smaller that have specific objectives during these large encounters like castle sieges and whatnot or they can uh be more on the on the higher member count side um and essentially right exactly and um at a certain stage of that of that guild advancement there comes an opportunity for the guild to elect to own a guild hall freehold so essentially what that does is it grants the guild leader uh the additional opportunity to follow a quest line for a a guild freehold plot that he would be the owner of but the guild has access to and can contribute towards and that allows them to build a guild hall out on a freehold system also they're static in node guild halls as well which come with different benefits and opportunities okay yeah that makes a lot of sense and uh that's one of the things that i i know that uh mcconnell and i talked about is like how how large could these things be and so you'd be able to pretty much destroy them if and you can destroy guild freeholds too you can assault guild freeholds right so the way that uh destruction works is um as as as nodes advance there are quest systems that are relating to achieving a siege scroll essentially and players can undertake that quest they can acquire the siege scroll and they can then lay the seat scroll down to declare a siege against a specific node and depending on the stage of the node will determine the quest line required and the additional resources needed to reflect kind of not only the amount of effort it took to build that node but that should be somewhat equitable to the amount of effort it takes to siege that node right so once the siege has been declared a server message goes out that tells the server hey you know in x day's time there will be a siege at this time and all of the affiliate uh all the alliance nodes with that node become automatically registered defenders for the siege um and they will be flagged as as defending the combatants against the attackers and any player who's not affiliated with an ally node of that node can come and register to attack against that against that node and what happens is during a two-hour period of time there's a central objective that players must participate in the defenders must run the clock out or destroy the headquarters of the attackers and the attackers must gain access to the city kill the quartermasters which increases the respawn time of the defenders and decreases the respawn time of the attackers and then they must reach a center point where they cast a five minute cast uh that's channeled and can't be interrupted by cc but can be interrupted through death uh on a central flag that exists in the in the node if the attackers are successful what happens is the raw goods and the processed materials that are stationed within that regional warehouse that players are using become loot a portion of it is sunk and then a portion becomes lootable to the attackers in addition you can steal their stuff you can steal raw gatherables and processed goods correct you can't steal completed items or potions or equipment but you can steal the raw uh gatherables but the more important incentive is that as over a guild's lifespan excuse me over a node's life span they have what's called a reliquary and the reliquary is a building within the node that houses all of the accomplishments the achievements the um unique and legendary items that the that the node has achieved that the citizens have access to for different crafting things and it destroys the reliquary and and access to limited use of those reliquaries are granted to the attackers as well now if the siege is successful the buildings inside are destroyed including static and node housing and the apartment buildings it's not going to be tedious for the players to to essentially go and find a new node and they can save their you know furniture layout and they'll get their furniture mailed back to them so they're not going to lose that component we don't want to we don't want to make it you know too too tedious to kind of get back up and running again because change should be a common theme in ashes through the destruction and siege mechanics but on the freehold side after the siege is completed and the attackers have won there's a two-hour window where the attacking the marauding kind of barbarians can go out into the open world where the zone of influence for that node was was relevant and can attack the freehold systems now players will have the ability to defend their freehold and if they survive that two-hour window of destructibility they will have a grace period where they can wait and see if another node pops up that they can exist under and if they do successfully get another node risen in that grace period then they'll fall under the tax purview of that note okay so you either get all your shit destroyed or you have to pay him that's pretty much how it works okay so it's like basically like uh you know like a real life the old marauders raiding you know like different cities right after they destroy uh the capital they go and they attack the you know out out which is okay correct and and one of the big things one of the big targets for players will be during that time is housing one of the biggest benefits of housing is that it offers you a separate depository separate warehouse system where you can deploy chests in the housing right and the freehold systems have superior type chests that can be granted they also store the pro the processing raw materials takes time within the processing plants those buildings that you construct on the on the freehold so uh during the declaration of a siege that declaration period that might might last three to five days depending on the size of the node the tr the uh the ability to remove raw goods and gatherables or resources oh excuse me materials from the storage containers is suspended you can't do it until after the siege so if you know there's some like legendary you know there's a guild hall out there with a shit ton of of materials and and goods that you know that guild has and you want to surprise them with that declaration and you succeed your next target is to go destroy that guild hall so you can then also uh uh loot their their uh chests and this is uh the size of this goes up to 250 on each side so that's for castle sieges castle sieges there are five unique castles that exist in the world uh one per region one per economic region and they exert control and and taxation rights over the nodes that live under their region and they also have unique benefits from a crafting and um from a crop rotation standpoint uh as well as unique uh items and equipment and abilities that are granted to the the host guild that owns it um and uh essentially what happens there is guilds go to register uh to attack those those castles and it's a 250 versus 250 player uh encounter now that's really easy to accomplish you know we have we have a great veteran team of developers many of whom came from planetside one and two and as you'll know planetside you know two hosts the largest concurrent uh online battle of over a thousand players in a single area and we have the programmers from those uh from those games so you know we feel very confident in the custom back end that we've been building under unreal engine 4 uh that will be able to facilitate that part of the you know the whole debacle and we got a lot of shit for it uh with apoc was to essentially um test these systems and luckily during that testing period we did discover that there were some architectural issues with with the things that we were developing if we had waited until later in the testing cycle after systems have been built on top of those foundational architectures it would have been a whole different beast to kind of to to fix so luckily we discovered it early through that testing method and you know we were able to to fix it and we have been demonstrating you know thousands of npcs in a single zone along with hundreds of players in our recent alpha 1 preview testing so you're confident in having 500 players in combat simultaneously being able to do a castle siege with minimal lag i will tell you this we are extremely confident on the 250 verse 250. right now we're trying to push it to 500 500 but i can't give any promises we'd be able to achieve that on the 250 versus 250 front we're very confident that there's some very specific there's some very specific culling algorithms uh that we have applied to essentially the not only from the client side where expensive rendering issues yeah there's so there's scalability on spell effects there's default player appearances to help rendering on the client side but more importantly on the networking side determining net relevancy and hosting specific uh players across distributed services on the server side is is a is a new type of architecture that we're employing for for ashes of creation which will help facilitate those larger battles okay yeah i think that makes a lot of sense the castle sieges especially from somebody like i love seeing those gigantic battles like the planetside ones the eve online battles and just seeing something like that that's what really kind of inspires me to play the game and so with wow they've had a lot of problems with that and uh i'm really glad to hear that because that's one thing that really makes an mmo you know the first massive you know you have a lot of people in the same place yeah i mean that's that's one of our core tenants right is kind of putting that massive back and massively multiplayer you know some of the most fun that i've had in the past even though it was a slideshow ship fest for a lot of games and it's no fault of the developers it's just technology hadn't caught up by that time right is uh is those massive battles are a lot of fun awesome you're in this brawl where you don't know what the fuck is happening and you're like you know having fun trying to coordinate you know the strategy for hundreds of players all at the same time as a leader or making sure that your group's doing the right thing those types of things are what make those experiences memorable oh i still remember shit like that that happened to me 10 years ago and so i can totally understand that and speaking of scale like what would be i this is kind of like an odd question what would we expect to see in terms of like large-scale monsters like are there gonna be krakens in the sea i like sea monsters right so absolutely so so another ten another core tenant when it comes to the immersion of the world is that this is a grand lore game and by grand i mean that there were monolithic and megalithic civilizations that existed the dungeons are tall and wide and expansive i mean there's a we released a 4k video last month of about two hours of uninterrupted unedited gameplay and at the end of that video you can see um you know some of the dungeons that we're going through and that and one of the one of the lower bosses that is a pyroclastic dragon essentially yeah um and they're i mean they're massive they're huge i mean there's one boss that is uh you know this kind of like half treant dude and you're like the size of his toe oh jeez it's a lot of a lot of massive stuff what kind of uh what kind of seafaring content i i saw that there's going to be a uh there's a profession for shipbuilding so what what do you get on your ship so you sail out on your ship what happens so ships are similar to caravans in the sense that there are components that can be built through the shipbuilding profession that enhance either the durability of the vessel or or a caravan the ability to to move and change directions rapidly the speed that it has the hit points that it has the offensive abilities um that's really the shipbuilding component on the naval front you know the idea there is that you will have the ability to acquire different types of blueprints for ship construction those class of vessels will exist from a personal vessel to a group vessel to a raid vessel so large like galleon type ships and there's a lot of content out on the ocean not just from a raid boss standpoint like you know large monsters like you know kraken related or more lovecraftian type yeah like a giant squid yeah right exactly uh and there will be there will be required some significant coordinated efforts among multiple raids to down some of those raid bosses but also there's going to be underwater dungeons and underwater kind of mounts that players can have as well so you're going to be able to acquire these different uh ships that are going to be relevant to different experiences and different encounters well that's certainly uh that that's that sounds fucking awesome i'm just going to say it sounds fucking awesome are there going to be islands out there in the sea that you can uh go and like kind of oh really okay yeah so so not only are there islands that exist out in the city that have you know either dungeon content or you know you can place freeholds on if it falls into the purview of a coastal node um but also nodes that exist along the coast will change the spawn tables of the content out in the water as well and those can attract specific events to that node so the node will hook up to a point of interest that is essentially its harbor and that harbor will have specific quest lines that relate out to the out out on the ocean and the islands that exist out there okay so it's like for example if you have like an oil rig and then the oil rig pollutes the water and then like the animals out there turn like more corrupted and more powerful or something like that yeah something like that i mean not not so much not so much the pollution but something similar yeah okay exactly corruption is the primary theme within the world you know the lore behind that's right right yeah that you're essentially coming back to a planet that was the home of your ancestors and they were driven out during the apocalypse uh by essentially the primary antagonists the ancients and the others that exist these evil gods and and the initial creation of the gods uh they come to kind of uh defile and pervert all of creation um and they drive your ancestors off this planet to a planet through the divine gateways called sanctus and then after thousands of years the portals open up again and that's where the races come from it's the different portals yes okay can you buy uh like is gear soul bound in the way that like once a character obtains it or equips it they can't trade it to other people or could you hypothetically buy a best and slot helmet or sword so the vast majority of gear that exists within the economy of ashes of creation is not soul bound and the the reason for that is because the crafting mechanics as well as the decay mechanics that exist require not only the deconstruction of gear but also the constant resupply of base mats in order to repair that decay it's not going to be some you know bullshit uh small gold compensation that makes a really irrelevant decay system uh it's actually going to re-uh invigorate the demand and supply of base materials for the rather the gathering uh artisanship tree and with that being the case you know we want there to be this open economy that utilizes this regional transit system and warehouse system in order to supply certain areas with the ability to craft and create new items so for example if you have an iron sword and then the sword gets damaged from use you have to use more iron to repair it correct and what that does is remember the interdependencies that we were talking about on the crafting system you want to make sure that there's significant sinks in the game for base mats and materials so that you are creating a scarcity and demand that's present on the creation of higher goods as well as supplying the necessary decay components for the world okay and so somebody that basically wants to play the game as a crafter or a gatherer can pretty much do that absolutely yeah 100 so um you know my philosophy when it comes to to mmos you know the mmos i played a lot of mmos and they all in some way shape or form have their own take on certain systems right um you know the best systems that i've encountered are the games that incorporate these progression paths that are relevant for different kinds of players not everybody is a pvper not everybody is a pve ear not everybody is a crafter but if you can create a system like ashes of creation where there are interdependencies between those different groupings those different different demographics of players you can harmonize the population that feed off of each other that are essentially are dependent absolutely right and the best mmos i've experienced are the ones that go for that pvx experience those are those are the best mmos that i've experienced but that means that not everybody can be a winner that there has to be a significant chase there has to be people who are the masters of their craft or the or the you know the best ranking on the pvp side have the you know legendary gear that means something that it just can't be this type of super you know just like means experience exactly well let's say like just in a hypothetical i don't know if you've really like thought of it this much in terms of in game but let's say uh you have a player that's just reached level 50 and then you have another player who has effectively like almost or the best gear in the game uh what would you say is the power difference between those two players that's a very good question so this is obviously a dilemma that a lot of games have to deal with what i would say is the way we're building ashes of creation is there are two primary components excuse me there are three primary components when it comes to an encounter like that first from a balancing perspective our balance uh is dealing with specifically group based bounds we are not balancing off of 1v1 so we're balancing off of an eight player group uh synergizing between the different effects that are housed within different active skills based on the archetype that you've chosen right so that's the first component the second com and that per and that provides a rock paper scissor type dynamic that's intrinsic in the trinity type system we're not trying to reinvent the wheel on the trinity side we feel that's a very competent type system and it's relevant to different classes um so with that being the first model the second one is that there should be something said for gear acquisition yes there is going to be a discrepancy between the the gear level of a hardcore player versus a casual player and that's okay because there should be certain progression paths that reflect a benefit for more time spent in investing in that progression path so with that being said with that being said not only are you going to acquire additional skill because you're more hands-on and tactile with the combat system because you're playing more often but you're also going to acquire uh different gear levels and that gear level can present you know if i were to give just an off-the-hand percentage difference i would say that we want gear to influence maybe at a max of like 40 to 50 percent uh of of overhead benefit now the third component however and that and that's the most extreme discrepancies right the third component is going to be level and skill right excuse me level level applies to second one the third one's gonna be skill the skill is gonna be important because the way that the uh the skills are essentially established is there's a lot of synergy effects that can occur based off status conditions that are applied so for example just to give you an idea of where the skill system works there's three primary skill sections there's passives there's actives and then there's combat skills combat reflects specifically your weapon skills so if you're a dagger if you're rogue and you're using a dagger and your dagger you want to invest some skill points into that weapon that weapon group you can start unlocking you know proc effects that cause the target to bleed that can cripple the target or hamstring the target and the way your active skills interact with that is let's say you don't have an auto attack feature by the way a weapon attack is an active combat attack so you have to actively press that weapon attack to use it um and when you do make contact with the target if you've invested skill points into that weapon you can essentially cause a bleed to proc if the bleed procs on the target you're going to have a corresponding skill like let's say backstab that you can apply to dlx damage to the target and it'll have a conditional modifier on that damage if you're behind the target and it'll have a conditional modifier deal additional 50 damage if the target is under a bleed effect so you want to synergize essentially your weapon uh proc conditions with your active skills so that you're timing your certain active skills appropriately with the status conditions that the target has taken so with that to answer your question long-windedly apologize um essentially you're going to have not only the the skill level the investment that you put into it the gear uh discrepancy between you and the target but also this um the skill profi the skills that you use to to to combat the character the amount of skills that you get uh so you level up to 50 is there any leveling system beyond 50 are the skills the leveling system beyond 50 or how does that work and are they finite or infinite so they are finite uh we intend to have you know a lot of additional content creation for the game post launch that will take that will manifest both on a monthly you know and a quarterly basis to kind of implement new new features into the game and whatnot because a lot of the features that we actually have discussed those are going to be present launch but we also have features that have been backlogged into post-launch feature feature sets but with that being said um on the progression level yes you progress to 50 but the way that our our skill system works is you choose one of the base 8 archetypes initially and then you choose from that base archetype again at level 25 and the new the secondary archetype does not grant you additional skills but it does give you access to what are called schools of augmentation and there are four schools of augmentation per secondary archetype so let's say you choose fighter uh initially as your primary archetype you're gonna have access to active skills that you can put your your uh skill points into and that'll get you like let's say a rush ability and the rush ability will allow you to charge x distance to a target upon reaching the target dlx damage and some condition modifier and that's the rush skill if you uh uh if you take the secondary class to secondary archetype of mage that'll give you access to four different augmentation schools the one of which may be teleportation the teleportation augmentation you can spec into and when applied to the rush skill will now instead of charging the target over x distance over x time will instantly teleport you to the target so uh upon reaching target you'll do like damage some condition modifier if you had chosen the elemental school you'll charge x distance to the target upon reaching the target you might set the target ablaze or deal electrical damage that deals damage over time so the idea is to house the active skills in the primary archetype but change the the uh skill effects as based on your secondary school which kind of blurs the line between what role you take in the whole in the holy trinity okay so there's like gonna be things like for example i saw that you had bards and bards don't really do damage they don't really heal but they kind of do a bit of both and empower other people is that kind of what you're saying right bards are a very strong support class so bars are essentially going to be proximity based buffs that become relevant and are timed according to essentially when the bar bar chooses to activate certain skills these are going to augment the tanking ability the evasions ability the dps the uh the healing abilities um you know they're gonna they're gonna be essentially the a whole array of buffs that are conditional and situational and based on proximity to your party member okay well that's definitely good to hear and uh is there going to be a class that's basically like a retribution paladin like a templar or a crusader or something like that yeah we have a templar um the idea kind of behind again these these augments is that you know you may be proficient in damage mitigation and tanking right or controlling the battlefield and drawing aggro and as you choose a secondary class like the the uh healing class you may be able to augment your aggro power your aoe aggro power to also convert incoming damage into health for your character or to grant a a temporary shield to damage mitigate and take the damage from a nearby ally if you target them um you know these are the types of of kind of augments that become available when the class systems are combined okay so they're kind of you have like your main class and kind of like a sub class which modifies your main class abilities effectively right through the augment system yeah and so flying mounts apparently are extremely exclusive there's only going to be 10 people with them on a server is that kind of what you're thinking hey look my phone is dying so actually let me transfer you over to the car and hopefully it doesn't okay okay how does this work uh it works yes it works you're good okay um uh sorry if you want to run to the restroom okay all right i'll be right back okay give me a second i heard another voice on who else is on here oh i'm nobody don't worry about me man i'm just here to hang out okay nice are you playing wow a lot oh yeah i love wow i've been playing wow for like 15 years man holy smokes that's a while yeah it's too long this game sucks uh classic is a uh yeah classics uh it's a game we sometimes play you know yeah i missed i missed out on the on the uh the wow boat i was really heavily into lineage at the time but honestly man you probably didn't miss much one thing i really appreciated about wow was the the rating system you know those i thought that that wow did that super well rating oh yeah yeah their rate systems uh or their raid rates been pretty good i like their uh art team in wild's been doing like pretty fucking good for like 10 years i would say right chad oh yeah there's such talented developers over at 100 oh yeah all right i'm back sorry about that welcome back yeah okay so um i was wondering about flying mounts like are they really going to be as uncommon as people uh make them out to be yeah so you know one of the things that and going back to kind of um that philosophy of of earning legendary shit that that you know is unique and is scarce um you know that's not just going to be with regards to like flying mounts it's also going to be in regards to unique items that exist on the server where only one can exist at a time um but also you know on the flying side we have different tiers of mounts essentially and the royal tier can only access uh on a time basis for guild leaders who own a castle and uh mayors who are mayors of metropolis stage which is the last stage of no development okay um but additionally players can also have an opportunity as a rare drop to get eggs from legendary uh bosses and then that egg system has a quest path that relates to pro the processing a profession of a husband um where you can essentially raise that pet excuse me that amount to um to have a lifespan that ranges from 15 to 30 days based on how well you raise the mount and then once you open the mount and use it for the first time its lifetime starts ticking so if you ever lose the castle or don't beco or aren't mayor one season or your mount dies you lose access to that so at any given time on a server there's only ever going to be between let's say 10 and 20 people that will have access flying out and the castle the castle siege mounts excuse me the castle mounts and the um uh and the node metropolis mounts those are huge mounts so these are very large dragons that have you know significant battlefield abilities like laying down massive so uh excuse me aoes so this is like like uh game of thrones yeah you see danny flying in and just burning the shit out of king's landing uh and that's what's happening okay well fuck yeah that sounds awesome so do the normal mounts also have life spans or is it just the flying mounts no just the royal mount so all the royal mounds have life spans all other mounts they can be so mounts can be separately targeted when you're on them they can also follow you um so you can be dismounted and they can be summoned um and essentially uh they can be targeted and killed if they're killed there's a cooldown time before they can be rewritten um and there's also going to be certain types of potions that can restore life on a mount that's been killed uh so you don't have to wait the cooldown time can you re-ride the uh royal mounts too or uh when it when they die are they just permanently dead no you can rewrite them as well so long as you have the satisfying condition and that conditions either being you know the mayor the guild leader or uh the lifespan available can uh can other people ride on the mount with you or are they all just one person so in the guild system um there is going to be uh essentially uh royal mounts that are temporary only during guild sieges now these won't and you can assign them to officers um so you're gonna have a limited selection that you can apply towards certain officers they'll have the ability to fly those mounts as well they're not gonna be as large and they won't have the same type of presence and abilities that the main mount has uh during the castle siege for the guild leader but they are going to provide a flying ability so you can have oversight of the battlefield that's cool that's cool like that basically exactly okay yeah like it has goal yeah like they're going to be the they won't be the witch king of agnemar but they will be like the little lesser yeah yeah the witch king is the guy with the royal mount is that right exactly okay all right that makes sense so is there any way so you have like the auction house is there gonna be any way to like buy currency in the game or is it going to be completely uh completely built inside of uh you know farming gold so like i know in runescape for example you can effectively buy gold with like bonds and uh and wow you can buy gold with the wow token and there are other things in the game that are effectively like kind of pay-to-win features uh are you guys gonna have anything like absolutely not no no okay that that's great so that i played is when the company comes in and you have a player driven economy and they think it's a great idea to throw something a wrench into that economy and introduce something on a microtransaction market that up defends the player-driven economy the people spend money when you think about the way that the economy and ashes of creation works essentially it's a traditional gold-based system however monsters don't drop gold per se what they drop are certificate and these certificates could be pelts they can you know it's just a work term we use it could be pelts they could be whatever that house the value of the monster's death okay and you accrue these over time um and what happens is you go to a certain node and based on the level of the node and the distance of that node from the location of the drop will determine the value of the certificate so like i said there's five primary economic regions and in that scenario there's five specific certificate types that are granted by the mobs that die in those regions you can move those certificates through the caravan system but if you get attacked and the caravan is destroyed a portion of those certificates gets sunk and then another portion are granted through the wreckage that the caravan now supplies the attackers so you you have to be strategic you can turn it in within the region you farm them you'll get lesser gold for that but if you want to take the risk you want to take some of those certificates across regions you can do it through the caravan system and it provides a significant sink but opportunity uh to the player again that's an opt-in type system so like for example if you're out in like a uh in like a winter area in like a northern mountain and you kill a yeti and then you take it all the way down to some southern area it's probably worth a lot more money exactly it could be worth upward or five times what you would normally get um uh for trading it into a huntsman at a local node where you farmed it okay and that's kind of about and you're balancing that basically with the idea that it's going to take players a while to go from point a to point b so there's two primary algorithms that are used when balancing the return ratio on those certificates okay first uh the the world server manager takes into account the existence of certificates in the normal population so we have a a tally of how much how many certificates are out there then we also have a a heat period that takes into account why that doesn't sound good a heat period oh we also have also we also have a period of time where we take into account uh the number of trade-ins of specific types of those pelts uh uh within let's say a week or a month period of time yeah and that also is a determining factor in the turn that you can get from the huntsman so you have a it's like an internal like supply demand uh or price demand algorithm oh absolutely okay that's part of our what we call our world manager uh and the world manager takes into account a lot of different it takes into account you know the the amount of experience that's being gained by players uh as a heat map on the world so that we know what type of threshold states can be applied to different node advancement we also take into account the transit of resources and goods from region to region so that there can be specific quests that provide uh those types of rewards based off of how much has been turned in so so for example part of what nodes can utilize to develop their treasury which they then spend on the development of of buildings or defenses is uh essentially uh incentivizing players you know raw iron raw mithril uh in that and then they get a reward and that reward is based on the algorithm of how much has been turned in elsewhere to kind of drive those questions additionally yeah there's a lot of stuff that goes into the world manager system okay so that's all kind of like basically a throttling system so things don't get too far out of hand in any sort of way right not only yeah throttle but it's also an incentive system so like for example if you know iron is being used as a raw resource to to for specific uh crafting path um you know that might drive up the price of mithril or silver right and that will incentivize the market force correct a little bit you know the idea is to provide soft incentives that uh help to alleviate the demand and also to prop up uh uh the supply that might not be present from it from the economic systems okay yeah i think that makes a lot of sense to me too like yeah i and so the there's not going to be any sort of real money trading or anything like that real money trading so players can trade uh there won't be allowed rmt's i guess yeah real money transaction right but you can you you can trade the currency within the game for purchasing items or whatnot okay now we we do have a already built into the game you know on the outset is um essentially behavioral metrics so you know in the game as a player does normal things and they acquire normal gold you know that's all good and well but if there starts to be item id that appear on the player account that are out of the norm like either a large amount of gold or you know significant legendary items like what that does exactly what it does in the back it flags the account view so that we can take a look at where did this item come from is it coming from a known gold seller or a flag bot or whatever and then we investigate so we're going to be pretty hard on the ability for players to subvert the natural economy systems by rmt or botting okay so another important yeah another important fact that you know intrinsically over the past decade what i've noticed in in a lot of games as mmos go the play route you see this serious influ gold seller otters and whatnot and this is super problematic because there's no barrier of entry for those types of bad actors in the game when you have a subscription based model what you do is you exchange the amount of gold sellers now they're still going to be gold sellers we're going to have to combat that and that's part of the behavioral metric system but um being a subscription-based game alone automatically cuts out significant population of the gold sellers that might be applicable to your game it doesn't stop them but it is a barrier entry yeah yeah because they have to pay money and then also because it takes so long to level and the odds are you're probably going to be able to make a lot more gold than ever your high level the investment is much higher and so if you're banning them at a higher rate than they're getting their return on investment then they're not going to be yeah yeah of course yeah that's what i mean and then one other thing that's super important is um oh in my experience as an mmo player i really hate the fact that not a lot of companies best in active gm teams gms who are present on the server yes day-to-day basis and are playing with the population and are there to actively enforce and and moderate uh what can be a major nuisance from these gold sellers and or botters um so one of the pledges you know in ashes of creation and something that is a personal interest of mine is making sure that the player base active gm force that are present on the servers uh and are participating okay well that's certainly a big relief and there's one more game question i wanted to ask is that what are stats on gear going to look like like what kind of stuff so yeah because gear is not class dependent you can have any type of want and gear is really the the type of gear you want to have is based on the encounter you're facing so you know if you're going to be a tank there's different types of tanks you can be sure from a balancing standpoint no game has ever achieved ultimate balance there's always that as there's going to be you know updates that try to address certain metas but we don't want it to stabilize the builds that people have built so we have to be really cognizant of that um but what i would say is that like when you acquire gear gear is going to have multiple types of stat allocations that are dependent on the crafter to determine and also there's going to be multiple types of sets that exist within the different tier levels of the gear that you can acquire from drops from monster or ray bosses or dungeons or quest lines all of which have different types of relevancy to whatever your focus is if you're a physical combat damage type focus you know there's going to be stats that augment your strength that affect your ability and the option to crit um those those types of going to be things that you'll have to make conscious decisions okay well that makes a lot of sense so you're basically going to have like the uh the usual like you know strength agility and then critical strike chance probably hit chance and stuff like that right yep will you have a like resistances like fire resistances yes so essentially players have the ability to augment their skills with certain types of damage or energy types and in addition you will have the ability to enchant and uh uh empower your equipment as well and you can empower and enchant them as a give and take type relationship where you may want to spec into a more specific fire type damage or radiant damage and then players will have the option to um to enchant their armor as resistant against certain types and what that does is it adds an additional layer of complexity and uh item custom class customization so that there's no just cookie cutter type experiences you have among all the different players that exist out there each person is going to have a very unique build in that regard and you're going to want to make sure you know who players on the battlefield are when you're going up against them or that you're synergizing with them if you form parties for pv okay that makes sense so like if you know you're going up against a node that's right next to a volcano you can probably get gear with fire resistance on and do better than average exactly and those socketed uh enchantments can be exchanged uh uh out as well they're not permanent okay well that makes sense and also the scale of the world is something that i'm kind of curious about so how long would it take uh on foot for example i don't know if you can give me like a ballpark on this to go from the top left of the map to the bottom right so on foot that would take multiple multiple hours um the idea behind the world size is you know between foreign um you know to put that into kind of context i guess um if gosh what was the name of that game well if you if you take a look at the at lineage as a as a world i believe lineage was about um 400 square kilometers and it was a significant trek across the the idea behind our travel systems though that as nodes develop you can get faster travel but fast travel is very difficult to attain you'll have to see a metropoli of the scientific type and then that can construct a building that offers a a player fast travel teleportation uh or airship travel to uh nodes that exist with under its vassal uh so it'll a metropolis zone encompasses about one world uh size okay under its zone of influence so you'll have fast travel under that uh scientific metropolis but faster travel is things like commissioning a uh uh you know a thunder bird to take you not the car but yeah an actual thunderbird an actual thunderbird fly you down to a node or a region quickly so you'll have flight paths exactly correct they'll be on a spline groot and they'll take you across the world um the idea there isn't why doesn't to me because a lot of that i played in the past there is the zerg mentality and mechanic where you know any given guild that's a large instantly port to a location and just overwhelm the people um the the no fast travel kind of i think curtails that a little bit if you get wind of a fan on the and your guild is like oh man we need to get there and everybody's out in parts of the world it should take some time to move to that location you shouldn't just be able to instantly teleport yourself you want to go and just overrun people so that fast travel uh gator is kind of uh gonna curtail that zerg mentality yeah that makes a lot of sense uh i i know that happens in like classic wow it happens and wow a lot will players be able to summon uh to other locations like let's say like yeah yeah so there's going to be a friendship mechanic that exists within the family system that will so there's a limited number of family members that you can have and essentially you'll be able to on cooldown summon certain family members so the idea is that this is a longer cast time uh and that you can slowly start to spawn your family members now you can only be ever be a member of one family so it's important if you want to coordinate kind of constant party or pve groups that you you know coordinate which families you're a part of so that you can summon out to different dungeons and whatnot okay so there is a way but it's very limited correct okay well that makes sense and uh a couple of questions is that uh when are we gonna get the alpha yeah yeah that's another we announced the alpha one is the end of the uh it's gonna be um you know something right now that we're in the middle of actually testing we have uh next month we've invited about i think there's a little over 450 people that are backer to participate in the preview of the alpha one client um and then as we kind of go through testing uh the server infrastructure as well as us bugs and bay systems for the alpha one that um then we're going to start opening it up to about 10 we have about 10 000 people who are scheduled for alpha um so time frame for that was about the end of this year wow and and 10 000 is about the size of one full server is that right right so uh our for a server between eight to ten thousand now if alpha one we're going to be mitigating that server concurrency because the playable area is significantly smaller than what the whole world will be so servers around 1500 to 2000 concurrency yeah because it's only about 20 of the world map that's playable and that's going to be happening at the end of the year correct wow okay and is the game the game isn't buy to play you just pay a subscription and then you can play it yeah so one of the things for me as a player that's really important is you know i don't like companies that try to nickel and dime players by having all three full of play i think blizzard austin whenever you have pre-order packages that are up but honestly you know you're not you're you're not losing anything by not purchasing those packages because there's no pay-to-win component in them they're just cosmetics so you know i highly advise people you know who are skeptical or think you know i don't know if ashes is going to be all it's hyped up to be wait until the game launches you'll be able to see we don't have we're not going to have an nda on out i'm not going to have an indianapolis you'll be able to see you know people playing this game you won't lose out on that experience um but you know as a as a part of a gift from me to the player base i'm not going to charge a buy to play there's not going to be a box price it's going to be entirely just a subscription base well that's certainly a relief i i know some games now they have a you have to pay a subscription you have to buy the game sometimes buy expansions on top of that and they have the micro transactions and uh it seems like a bit much yeah my philosophy is if you build it they will come and a subscription is more than enough or a company that is has a successful game under its belt to provide constant updates content releases uh and it really just creates a healthy dynamic between the player base and the developers providing new experiences for them so it doesn't need to have a you know a raking in on the buy to play front a box price that you buy a 50 expansion whatever all the dlc and the expansions will part of the subscription price so um right now that's at 15.99 a month that we're going to be doing uh when it launches um but you know one of the things that's that's really important to me and you know i'm i'm funding the project myself and you know we don't we don't have you know this this the desire to be transparent is a double-edged sword um you have to trust the player base to look at things with a a objective and understand that making an mmo is hard as fuck and making an mmo of our size even harder so um you know we want players to be a part of that because the good side of the sword is you guys get to give us feedback you get to give us input you get to get on our discord server and chat with me and other developers and you know tell us your experiences as an mmo player what did you enjoy what excites you what are you liking about the experiences you've experienced in ashes so far that's all so meaningful to us as developers as we go through the iteration process from test period to test period and we continue building this game are all the animations perfect during alpha no of course not is the content got all the content going to be there no of course not you know is there still going to be a shit ton of polish that's needed on the game absolutely you know that 4k video we put out last month even though it looked good it's nowhere near what it's going to look like when the game is near the polish phase and it's going to be actually ready for launch so you know what i would advise i know you got a lot of viewership and by the way i really appreciate you taking your time even though i'm in the car coming on here and chat likewise opportunity just to tell people look this is a process but our ultimate end goal to make a product of quality that we are proud of and that you are proud of and that means not rushing to market not launching early taking our time and building the things that need to be built you guys like what you're hearing on the systems and mechanics side trust us that's what's going to be built and we're going to take the time necessary to make sure it's built right and that that's i think something that's reassuring for a lot of people i think that a lot of the vitriol and like emotionally based concerns that people have really stem out of not being listened to or feeling like they're not heard so having a more direct wine with the community and everything is definitely something that i see developers doing and whenever that happens you might have people that disagree with the developers say but they can at least respect that they're getting the communication absolutely that's 100 right i mean i i like now that more developers participate in active conversation with the community you know for me personally over the past years of production five years since i've undertaken the intrepid endeavor you know my life is ashes of creation i live eat breathe wake up and you know don't get sleep over over building this game like my fellow developers we're doing it to to make something that players that we love in this genre that love the genre like us are gonna have been asking for for a long time and you know having a company that respects the players and their input is you know not something that's seen very often no um and it's it's important to to show other publishers and companies and game developers that there is a right way to engage your audience and to know your such not design decisions get influenced by a board of suits they're looking to make the bottom line opposed to creating something that respects what players want and that gives you the longevity and retention that an mmorpg deserves yeah i i completely agree with all that i feel like there's always been especially now with like you know these companies being public and making decisions for shareholders and not players and i think this has happened a lot with many games and like many genres i mean you've seen it happen with fallout i think that was one uh wow problems and uh to have things that are kind of by players for players is something that have you ever played path of exile yeah look at the love that people have for that game absolutely that's a perfect example yeah i mean you know i'll tell you this i know that there's a lot of skepticism out in the mmrpg community in a whole not just about ashes but about any new development yep and that's because we've been beaten time and time again with a stick and we're like this hurt dog that is like somebody comes up to you with a freaking beef jerky you know biscuit and they're like here have this new mmo and they beat the shit out of you again yeah and it i understand that that is reason why a lot of the of the jadedness and skepticism you know comes out it's understandable what i would say there's nothing more motive to it especially on a project like ashes than to see the excitement from a community about the design philosophy and mechanics that we're instituting in the game and if you have skepticism just sit back and wait watch see what happens you know it doesn't shitting on people is not it's not beneficial to making significant change in a genre we all love yeah i think that's one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of us you know we just really want to play a good game that's really what ultimately matters and uh i mean like i i've always been kind of critical about wow and uh it's really good to see what this game is shaping up into and i think one thing that really i i think i can speak for at least a lot of people in my audience that is reassuring is that it seems like a lot of the ideals and the phyllis uh the philosophy that you guys are taking into the game is something that's shared by a lot of players and not as many developers and i think that's probably one of the most refreshing things to hear yeah absolutely appreciate that yeah we're excited well yeah we are too especially now more than ever so thanks a lot for coming on and talking about all this it really means a lot to us and for our community uh thank you very much and we are very anxiously waiting to be able to play the alpha thank you appreciate that buddy i'll hook you up with that alpha i know you messaged me all right man all right thank you very much to your community thanks for the time but appreciate it have a good day all right talk to you later bye take care bye dude so what do you think what do you think dude yeah what listen if this game comes out yeah with everything that's been promised and it's polished wow i was done i don't think wow it's gonna be done i'm gonna be honest like this game's never gonna die like but it'll be a good game to play too like i would love to have another game that we could play so i'll be honest i i hope guys that i did a good job with the interview okay um i really do obviously i tried to do my best asking the questions that i thought were relevant uh there were tons of things that you guys wanted to uh wanted to have me ask i didn't have uh uh what do i didn't have a ton of a ton of questions i took from you guys but i do want to say thank you all very much for uh for watching that and uh also for uh for being supportive i did a great job well thanks i appreciate it um i i did and um new man sky 2.0 well the difference between no man's sky and this is we actually have a play test for it and uh also the other big difference between no man's sky and this is uh this is being self-funded so there aren't there isn't pressure from uh like publishers there isn't pressure from you know microsoft for example to push a product so it's not really the same thing now obviously i mean there are games that could be uh you know this game could be in in development for the next five years uh we don't really know hopefully that's not going to be the case but um if that's what it takes and that's what matters this has been something that we've been waiting to hear for a long time as mmo players or at least i can speak for myself um i i've wanted to hear what what what steven had to say for a long time it didn't really matter who was saying it but he was saying it and uh this has been something that we've been looking forward to and wanting to see forever i mean i feel like we've been neglected we've been uh his analogy about us being like mmo players being fucking the dogs just getting the shit out of us like that dude come here here's aon here's another fuck you that was that was so spot on it actually hurt a little bit no it really did it was it was kind of sad wasn't it uh are you backing a kickstarter yeah i'll back to kickstarter uh i will i absolutely will i think that it's a good option and you know i always talk about supporting things and you know that kind of stuff and i think that's the best idea is to uh to lead by example