The return

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Adventurers arrive on Verra through great divine gateways.[1]

For those of you who are unaware of the lore of how you get into the world of Ashes of Creation, essentially actually Verra was your ancestral home and when you play the MMORPG you're going to be stepping through what are called these Divine Gateways from a planet called Sanctus; and Sanctus was really a safe haven that was forethought by the Goddess of Fate and Creation as a sanctuary to provide the people of Verra who could survive the fall- the apocalypse- the exodus, essentially.[2]Steven Sharif

The return began with the divine gateways reigniting in Sanctus back to the four capital cities of Verra, which have laid in ruins for centuries following The Apocalypse.[3][1][4]

You are returning to a world that has essentially been destroyed and left untouched for many millennia, and as a result those old capital cities are essentially the ruins of which you're returning to; and the new cities that you are developing- the node structures that exist- these are brand new cities. They might be couched within ruins of old empires so to speak, but they will not be representative of the old capital cities.[5]Steven Sharif
Ancient evils lie in wait for hapless adventurers.[1]

The Ancients exist within the Void until there is a conduit that opens for them to enter into the material plane, so a lot of the Harbingers that still exist on Verra as dungeons essentially is where the Ancients are capable of pushing into the material plane; and they can continue to do so under the guise of the effects of corruption as it spreads; and there are events that lead to the spreading of corruption that players will have to fight back against. These events that occur, players are going to need to participate to keep the intrusion on the material plane back.[6]Steven Sharif

Vast expeditions were sent through the gateways to discover this beautiful and perilous magical realm.[1] Players arrive in Verra to explore, rebuild and repopulate their place of origin. Ancient treasures and wondrous adventures await those who dare to disturb the dark remnants of evil that inhabit this land.[1]

  • Players start in Verra a few short months after the very first expeditionaries were sent through the divine gateways when they opened from Sanctus.[7]
The Ancients have been on Verra for a long time prior to your return; and it's important to note that players who are starting in the world of Verra, they're coming in actually a few short months after the very first expeditionaries were sent through the Divine gateways when they opened from Sanctus. And the early days on Verra with the return were not super easy. They were difficult. There were struggles with the food supplies. There were a little bit of mutinies that occurred. There were certain artifacts that were found by some of these NPCs that were your predecessors in the return; and some of them decided that they would be better off on their own, or that they had a more powerful thing or creature that they could follow and be rewarded from.[7]Steven Sharif
  • Harbingers that exist on Verra as dungeons are where The Ancients are capable of pushing into the material plane. They can continue to do so under the guise of the effects of corruption as it spreads. There are events that lead to the spreading of corruption that players will have to fight back against. When these events occur, players will need to participate to keep the intrusion on the material plane back.[6]
  • From now on, the choices of these adventurers will influence how the story unfolds.[8]
I heard a lot of people asking was, from a technological standpoint where do the people returning stand in relation to what their civilization was before the fall; and I think that in some regards they haven't quite even attained what their people were able to achieve before the exodus.[9]Steven Sharif

Verra

Verran map scroll.[10]

Verra was created to house four separate... divine races and they're called divine races because the remaining seven gods imbued their characteristics within each of these different races. They didn't put all of them into one and make the same mistake. They had focuses really that these races took essentially.[2]Steven Sharif

The name of the Ashes of Creation world is Verra.[11]

Verran continents and locations:

Verran oceans:

  • The Fortunic Ocean.[10]
  • The Umbral Sea.[10]
  • Tradewind Sea.[10]
  • The Avaric Ocean.[10]

In terms of game development, Intrepid Studios is focussed on developing the Western continent first.[14]

World map

Updated Ashes of Creation map.[15][16]

The new world map in all its 1,200 square kilometer glory. So you're gonna see some names here- a little bit of a reveal of some of these locations in these areas- and you're also of course seeing similar biomes that are present as well. But more importantly what you are seeing is the orientation of these continents and these islands that are facilitating specific types of inter-continental trade gameplay; and they support the relevance of these caravans moving across the land mass to locations that will now incorporate these harbor areas, which aren't identified on the map here... But the important part was providing a lot of coastal naval gameplay between these zones and trade routes between land base.[16]Steven Sharif

Alpha-2 work-in-progress map UI.[17]

The world of Verra features an in-game viewable world map. This map is not randomly generated, and begins covered in a fog of war.[18] Players will not be able to see the world until they have explored it or gathered information about it. The world is also full of imperfect information, which will require the player to act on it for verification.[19]

For example, you may hear a rumor in a tavern that tells you the location of a cave full of weak Kobolds, but this was not accurate as the rumor was started by well-equipped bandits in order to waylay overconfident adventurers.[19]
  • Not every server will share the same map, as player decisions will vary between servers.[25][26][21]
Even though we're an open-world that doesn't mean that from a design perspective, especially with the way our economic systems work, that we will want to create Geographic choke points.[28]Steven Sharif
info-orange.pngSome of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Starting areas

Alpha-1 early preview starting area.[31]

There is no railroaded driven theme park experience here. You will have the opportunity to create your own destiny in that regard, which means you don't have to necessarily follow the quest line nor do you have to participate in events or experiences around the starting area. Now it may be more beneficial to do that; and in that regard I guess there could be a meta around doing that, but you could branch out proceed to other areas and do different content.[32]Steven Sharif

Starting areas (starting zones) are located in the ruined cities of the four ancient races of Verra.[33]

  • Starting areas include expeditionary NPC settlements that serve as initial quest origination points.[34] Lore-wise, these settlements represent scouts that were sent ahead of the main expedition back to Verra.[40]
    • These settlements are designed to acclimatize new players entering the world.[40]
    • While it may be advantageous to do so, there is no requirement for players to play through any specific starter zone content.[32]

A problem that a lot of MMOs have is that those starting areas become just vacant of players and it's so sad because the greatest aspect of an MMO is that community that you get to experience, so one of the great things about the node system is that it really works from new player acquisition standpoint, where these nodes tend to develop larger near the starting location areas around the world; and it brings these players back to those locations if they're citizens and want services within those cities. So, as new players enter the world they're going to actually be surrounded most likely by more population because people are coming back to those larger nodes.[41]Steven Sharif

Divine gateways

Empyrean divine gateway concept art.

When you play the MMORPG you're going to be stepping through what are called these divine gateways from a planet called Sanctus and Sanctus was really a safe haven that was forethought by the Goddess of Fate and Creation as a sanctuary to provide the people of Verra who could survive the fall, the apocalypse, the exodus essentially.[2]Steven Sharif

Divine gateways are portals located in the ruined cities of the four ancient races of Verra.[33]

Where players start, they enter this portal from another world called Sanctus. Sanctus is a place of no magic, low technology; and players are the first expeditioners that are coming through this portal into the world of Verra.[43]Jeffrey Bard

Sladeborne

Pre-alpha Sladeborne NPC race. This was a once-beautiful race of cloud-dwelling bird people who were struck by the great calamity long ago.[45]

Sladeborne are a corrupted NPC avian race in Ashes of Creation.[46][45]

  • The Sladeborne were first revealed as a mob in Alpha-0.[45]
  • When the Apocalypse occurred, the sentient avian races didn't think to go into the Underrealm. Their first inclination was to take to the sky. The Sladeborne race is indicative of what happened to those who chose not to take refuge in the Underrealm.[47]
  • Sladeborne tribes.

There are bastions that existed of the avian-like races in AoC on Verra before the Apocalypse and before the remaining major and minor races fled to the Underrealm, that held out for a period of time. But there's specific reason why in A0 one of the first races you experienced as monsters or NPCs was an almost humanesque avian bird race. This particular race is I think indicative to what happened to those races because they chose not to go to the Underrealm and there are specific war reasons as to the leaders of those minor races that chose not to do so, which will be revealed in future stories and questlines.[47]Steven Sharif

Player driven narrative

One of the major goals I feel like we have is to allow player decisions to have consequences and to have meaningful results from the decisions that they make, so it seems like people can really create their own stories.[48]Aimi Watanabe

The world of Verra will be the same on each server, but Nodes will develop differently. Different servers will have different narratives. Things that happen on one server may not happen on another.[26]

We want as many people as possible to experience the main server Narrative. These will branch at different scales, but largely at the personal level. Where things change is at the Node level – different parts of the story will be unlocked based on where and when Nodes grow. Unlocking a part of the story in a certain way locks out progression of the story in a different way. You’ll see different antagonists, different NPCs, and different calls to action depending on what’s happening with the server at that time.[50]

It redefines what the players will experience in an MMORPG to come into a wilderness that is devoid of really any structure outside of what the community creates themselves; and then what can be created can be changed, if they want to experience a storyline that's been seen on another server, but you're fighting a dragon because you're near a mountain and the other server's fighting a Kraken because they're near the coast and you want to fight that Kraken because of its drop table. If you want to meta it or because you just want that under your belt: to be the server first to take out that Kraken and you have yet to develop the node there, it's incumbent upon you to manifest that in the game.[51]Steven Sharif

Storyline quests

Story arc quests (Storyline quests/Narrative quests) contain objectives for each chapter of a story arc.[52][53][54][55][56][21]

  • Players can progress each chapter by completing story arc quests within the timeframe that each chapter is active.[54]
    • Phase timers are shown (in the quest UI) to indicate how much real-world time is available to complete the quests in each phase.[53]
    • If the player completes all quests in a particular chapter, they will need to wait until the next chapter to obtain further quests.[57]
  • Story arcs can branch into different stories with multiple possible endings depending on the quest objectives that players complete during each chapter.[52][53][55]
You can't really farm the quests in any meaningful way, because once you've done the quests in a chapter, that's it until the next chapter. Whether 1000 people participate or 10, the chapters will stay active for the same length of time, and as long as you participate in the clearly-marked time frame in your quest journal, you're good. The only thing that a concentrated effort can help with is influencing the narrative paths through the arcs.[57]Skott B
  • These quests stages can be failed. The ability to retry a failed quest depends on Node progression.[55]
There will be many different quests that actually have stages of the storyline; and these stages can actually be failed. You can actually fail a storyline; which sucks when you think about it, but at the same time that risk makes your investment that much more important.[55]Steven Sharif

Story arcs

Alpha-2 early preview of the story arc UI.[60]

Story arcs are like a pre-packaged tabletop campaign. They contain all of the NPCs and quests and monsters- all the things you need to make a cool fantasy story. They're not procedurally generated... We write all the dialogue and we construct all the narrative beats and everything like that, but they will enter the world dynamically depending on the state that the world is currently in; how players have built up specific nodes, what races control various nodes. We have plans to include lots of different things on top of that, but we don't have any quest hubs or anything like that in this game, because players build up all the cities. So we had to get a system that looks at what players are doing and can inject content into the world that makes sense for what they're doing.[61]Skott B

The Blood Still Due story arc unlocking at The Tower of Carphin.[62]

When story arcs come online, they change a lot the environment. They update what monsters are in the world. They create quest NPCs... and then new Pathways can open up through the environment.[63]Skott B

Story arcs are unlocked by multiple types of player activity within each server.[64][62][61][65]

Every stage a node develops it's unlocking narratives, storylines, it's changing the spawn population of the area around it, changing what bosses exist, it's triggering events where you may have legendary dragons attack the city. It's basically writing the story of the server based on the actions and determination of the players. So, you may experience a dungeon one month earlier and have a completely different story that relates to this location the next month, because something has changed either geopolitically or from the node standpoint.[65]Steven Sharif
Even player driven mechanics will still have story components. There will be a reason why the player driven mechanic is available or required of the player; so every system that's created touches a story.[72]Steven Sharif
  • If there are too many other major arcs happening at the same time in the same zone, a story arc may need to wait its turn, even if conditions are right for it to be unlocked.[64]
  • Story arcs drive one or more storyline quests within the game.[52][53][54][55][56]
    • Story arcs can branch into different stories with multiple possible endings depending on the quest objectives that players complete during each chapter.[52][53]
    • The developers will try to ensure that story arcs in future expansions flow on from existing story arcs, regardless of the different possible outcomes.[52]
  • There will be a variety of different types of story arc content at different scales, with different cooldowns to suit different types of players in the game.[75]
We must provide enough of this content at varying scales such that it isn't worthwhile or economical to control every single story arc in the world. Some will be smaller in scale and production value, and thus, will move faster and have shorter cooldowns before they're reintroduced.[75]Skott B
info-orange.pngSome of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Certain story arcs can be unlocked through the bulletin board system. Certain requirements would need to be met in order to access story arc quests.[79]

Racial quests

Quests may be based on a character's race.[80]

Different quests may relate to who the primary cultural contributor is to a node. This won't lock out content, but will add flavor to the quests.[80]

There might even be different directories of the quest that exist for specific races, and even though you're sharing a quest to kill a boss, if you're human and I'm an elf, I will have a different arc potentially that leads in a different direction than you, even though we took the same quest; and this can relate to who the primary cultural contributor is to a node unlocking different arcs for cultures that share the primary culture of a node - not that locks out content but it gives a flavor in a different direction so that not everything is so cookie cutter.[80]Steven Sharif

Race matters because narratives have paths that also are influenced based on the primary contributing culture to the node... If you're a Niküa and you have you're in a Niküa node that's predominantly Niküa, you're going to have certain services and/or abilities as a member of the Niküa race that other races may not have access to... They may have alternative quest lines, but they won't have specific ones. Now those specific Niküa quests will then relate to the meta-narrative that's present in the world and they'll start to direct some of that meta-narrative; and that'll be beneficial for your kind because it will unlock certain content for your race that other races haven't unlocked yet. So there is an incentive there to see progression along that line now in order to curb the progress of a dominant race.[81]Steven Sharif

Quests that are race specific, title specific, or guild specific will likely be less than 10% of the total number of quests. 90% of quests should be able to be shared by everybody.[82]

World history

info-orange.pngSome of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

The history of each server will be tracked and visible to players in a node's library.[24][84]

  • This design may have changed.[20]
We're gonna keep track of the history of the world so that we can tell people the story up to the current day. A player who's brand new, who's come in at the six-month mark can take a look at each server, what each server has done, how each server has tackled the storyline; and they can decide for themselves what community they want to join; what version of the world that they want to take part in.[84]Jeffrey Bard
  • Scribes may be able to collect and record information about the events of the world as they see it from their point of view.[85]

Languages

Languages in Ashes of Creation may refer to:

Roleplaying

Backpack sockets (slots).[89]

A big component of the MMORPG that - half of that acronym is RPG role-playing game. And in order to role-play you need to be able to represent what your character is doing in that world and part of what animation is doing is creating these sockets on the let's say the belt or the back that can plug in certain types of props or items that are created by the character team, like Carson, might be a scroll tube, it might be a potion, it might be whatever: Those players will have the ability as we've discussed in the past will have the ability to select what they want to be represented in those sockets and then animation will make sure that jibe well in movement.[89]Steven Sharif

Fzp5K3MX0AYvpjA.jpg

Roleplaying is supported by various systems in Ashes of Creation.[90][91]

A MMO lives and breathes on its community and we don't really want to give short shrift to any one of those types. All of them are important: the RPers are important, the people who just want to hang out in the Inn and talk are important, they all add to the game and so we want to make sure that we take care of all of them... You can run a business based on RPing.[94]Jeffrey Bard

Respawn lore

Alpha-2 player death animation.[95]

The lore behind how death and resurrection exists within Ashes of Creation is the concept of this Avatar of the Phoenix being represented of the Goddess of Creation, from which all life on this plane has has come from essentially... Because when you do get reborn it's that connection with your soul to the essence that binds you with the Goddess of Creation that brings that spark of the of that Avatar of the Phoenix back and brings you to life through that manipulation of the essence. So this is a little update on the ash effect.[96]Steven Sharif

Characters entering into the world of Verra are empowered with the spark of life that comes from the Goddess of Creation. This spark houses a portion of what represents their mortal coil/soul and their conduit to The Essence.[97][96][98][99] When a character dies they disintegrate into ashes, in accordance with the mythology of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth that is associated with the celestial avatar of the Goddess of Creation, the phoenix.[96][98]

  • The ash pile conveys the location of the body, so that the character may be selected for resurrection.[96]
  • The ash pile is also interractible to allow players to loot any dropped items.[96][98]
  • This effect applies to players and not mobs.[96]

The reason for why respawning occurs, as you guys know, the avatar of the Goddess of Creation is the phoenix; and the phoenix obviously has some very stable mythological lore to it with regards to the cycle of life and death and rebirth; and that type of thing. As you enter into the world of Verra you are in a way empowered with the spark of life that comes from the Goddess of Creation herself, and in that sense you're able to house a portion of what that represents in your soul and your... conduit to the essence.[98]Steven Sharif

See also

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