Talk:2021-07-08 Allcraft - Ashes of Creation

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• 00:00

Ladies, gentlemen, there's not much that could stop me and Asmin from hanging out in the

• 00:14

FC with all of our catgirl friends and drinking Fantasia, but there is one man who, on his

• 00:20

birthday as well, and Steven, we gotta thank you.

• 00:24

Happy birthday, thank you for coming on the show.

• 00:26

On your birthday?

• 00:28

Happy birthday dude, I didn't know that.

• 00:30

Yeah, thank you.

• 00:31

I turn 36, but I feel like I'm turning about 70 today.

• 00:38

It was unfortunate timing though, the test weekend on the birthday weekend, but no, I'm

• 00:45

having a great time.

• 00:47

And I think a lot of people are going to be having a great time as well with the test

• 00:49

weekend.

• 00:50

We hit you up kind of last minute because we're very excited for the test weekend.

• 00:53

We have a lot of questions to ask you and I think one of the first things that we'll

• 00:58

just jump right into this one because we don't want to, I think there's so much that we have

• 01:03

to talk about that we kind of have to dive right in.

• 01:05

One of the first things that I want to ask you, Steven, is going into a weekend like

• 01:09

this, what is the focus?

• 01:11

What is the team actually trying to accomplish?

• 01:13

What are you going to be looking for?

• 01:14

That's a good question.

• 01:17

This is our first alpha of the MMORPG and we have done a lot of work.

• 01:26

And we've kind of adopted this transparent development process to show our community

• 01:31

a peek under the hood, so to speak, because building an MMORPG is a massive undertaking

• 01:40

and ours is a particularly ambitious one.

• 01:42

So it's always good in my opinion to get feedback as early as possible.

• 01:47

The most important thing I would say that we're looking for as a development team is

• 01:52

a lot of metrics on the core systems, on our server architectures, on performance, on stability,

• 01:59

on these core systems, the node system propagation, the character progression, the NPC behaviors.

• 02:10

There's a lot of core functionality that alpha is intending to kind of provide us good metrics

• 02:16

with.

• 02:17

But at the same time, it's also about letting the players see the progress in the development

• 02:22

and giving an opportunity for even those who aren't participating in the alpha to kind

• 02:27

of view it from an unprescribed perspective, like getting a look at it from other players,

• 02:34

seeing the good, the bad, the ugly.

• 02:37

In my opinion, it's a good thing to do that because if you don't do that, you can get

• 02:44

into a scenario where you've gone through the development of a game and it's too late

• 02:49

to make significant pivots and significant changes.

• 02:52

And you're like, OK, we're debuting this in beta and people get to see and provide feedback.

• 02:57

And then it's too late to make significant changes before launch occurs.

• 03:01

Right.

• 03:02

I think a lot of us as players have kind of seen that play out on a few games that we

• 03:06

participated in.

• 03:07

Unfortunately, yes.

• 03:08

Yeah, exactly.

• 03:09

And that's never it's never a good feeling.

• 03:12

It's never a good feeling for the players.

• 03:13

It's never a good feeling for the developers.

• 03:14

So I think I think it's a good trend if as the industry progresses, like we at least

• 03:20

from a company perspective, from a development perspective, like we lose that fear of showing

• 03:25

early progress because oftentimes marketing departments will look and say, hey, we only

• 03:31

get one opportunity to show the game, so to speak.

• 03:35

Right.

• 03:36

And you can't always trust that like players are going to look at an alpha and say, OK,

• 03:39

this isn't finished yet.

• 03:40

And there's a long way to go still.

• 03:42

And they make their kind of you know, they make their judgment at the alpha stage and

• 03:46

we won't ever recoup those users.

• 03:48

Like I don't believe that.

• 03:50

You know, I think obviously there are going to be individuals who make kind of assumptions

• 03:53

and maybe don't go into an alpha with the right expectations.

• 03:57

And you know, it's on the kind of it's on behalf of the company to express that it's

• 04:01

on behalf of streamers and content creators to kind of help give the message out like

• 04:05

this is an alpha.

• 04:07

And and I think we can trust that gamers are going to look at that and say, all right,

• 04:11

well, here's things I'd like to see change.

• 04:13

Here's things I enjoyed in previous games that I played.

• 04:16

And like, how can we view this progress as development continues?

• 04:19

So that's kind of like our two toned agenda with alpha is one, obviously collecting the

• 04:24

data that we need to collect and testing the systems we want to test.

• 04:27

But two is also setting expectations so the players know this isn't a content test.

• 04:31

Right.

• 04:32

This is this is a more technical oriented test.

• 04:35

This is us making sure the servers are standing up and don't fall on their face and like players

• 04:39

can connect and we get the concurrency that we want and the performance that we're looking

• 04:43

for.

• 04:44

And, you know, that's that's, I think, a really important part of the whole the whole weekend.

• 04:48

Yeah, I think that, you know, when I look at the project as a whole, Asmin and I obviously

• 04:55

no strangers to the MMORPG scene.

• 04:57

We've been hurt a lot.

• 05:00

We've been we've been promised an analogy.

• 05:03

It's one of those things where, you know, after being MMORPG players for so long, it's

• 05:12

really affected our hairlines to the point that our hairline actually matches the the

• 05:18

logo for NordVPN, the official sponsor of the show.

• 05:22

And going into looking at Ashes of Creation, I have to admit I was a little bit at first

• 05:29

a little bit dubious.

• 05:30

Right.

• 05:31

Because I'm looking at all of the systems.

• 05:32

And I'm like, this is what I want.

• 05:34

How can they all be there?

• 05:36

And it's just like, I don't trust anyone at this point.

• 05:40

And then we had the opportunity to hear you on a lot of different streams.

• 05:44

And I started to believe again.

• 05:47

And I have so many questions about how hard it's been for you guys to get so many varying

• 05:53

systems off the ground and making them functional.

• 05:57

And I kind of want to start with the node system, because to me, as somebody who, you

• 06:02

know, have have some background in game design, a lot of background in playing really bad

• 06:07

MMORPGs and really good MMORPGs.

• 06:09

I looked at the node system as one of those systems where if everything's going perfectly

• 06:14

and you have the right amount of players, it's going to be one of the most exciting

• 06:19

systems I've ever played.

• 06:20

But if there aren't enough players, is it going to feel interactive?

• 06:23

If there are too many players, are you going to have those FOMO moments where you're trying

• 06:27

to rush from area to area to hit these large scale events at the right time?

• 06:32

How does a system like that actually come together?

• 06:34

How hard has it been to get it off the ground?

• 06:38

You know, it actually funny enough, the node system, while it's extremely intricate and

• 06:43

has a lot of components as part of the design of that system, it wasn't too difficult to

• 06:49

get off the ground.

• 06:51

But you know, going back, I think first, even before we get into the node thing, I just

• 06:55

want to say, like, the reason I started Intrepid is because of the feelings that you expressed

• 07:02

when you first heard of Ashes, right?

• 07:04

Like I, when I use that beaten dog analogy, like I was a part of the beaten dog syndrome.

• 07:11

The reason I wanted to undertake creating an MMORPG as crazy as this has been is because

• 07:18

as a player, my, you know, my large portion of my like social development growing up because

• 07:25

I started working at a young age was through MMORPGs, like jumping on to Ventrilo and like

• 07:31

hanging out with your friends and your guild and going and defeating the bosses and playing,

• 07:36

you know, going through dungeons and getting wiped and like spending hours trying to kill,

• 07:40

you know, the giant dragon or, you know, having the enemies guilds fighting for castles, stuff

• 07:46

like that was my experience.

• 07:48

That was like my social development for the most part.

• 07:51

And so MMOs had like a really special place in my heart.

• 07:54

You know, I started playing when I was seven years old with Neverwinter Nights on AOL and

• 07:58

pretty much played every MMO, you know, since then.

• 08:02

And I just was, I was really disillusioned with the state of the genre because it seemed

• 08:08

like a lot of the MMOs that we were getting as a player base, at least in a Western audience,

• 08:13

was Eastern ports over, right?

• 08:15

And a lot of times, like, you know, they had cool mechanics and good stuff, but just the

• 08:19

monetization practices completely destabilized any player driven economy or, you know, the

• 08:28

retention of those players.

• 08:29

And it was just, it was just so ridiculous.

• 08:32

It was so ridiculous.

• 08:33

I mean, I have a story of like this one game I was playing and there was this mount that

• 08:39

I really wanted and they introduced the mount.

• 08:41

It was a bear in this loot box and like it was a super rare bear mount.

• 08:47

And I purchased so many, I'm ashamed of myself for doing it, but like I purchased so many

• 08:52

of these loot boxes.

• 08:54

Like I think I spent like 700 bucks to get this bear.

• 08:56

It wasn't like anything special.

• 08:58

It was just a cool looking bear.

• 09:00

It wasn't like a powerful bear.

• 09:01

It was no like difference in game design or anything.

• 09:04

And literally the next month they put the bear on the marketplace for $10 and I was

• 09:07

just, oh my God.

• 09:10

Did you get it?

• 09:11

You got the bear, right?

• 09:12

I got the bear after like 700 bucks and I was just so fricking pissed.

• 09:18

And then, and then like the next thing they did, there was like this super integral component

• 09:23

of the economy was like these unique types of trees that you would grow and stuff.

• 09:27

And it was super rare.

• 09:28

And like they introduced this like unique seedling in the marketplace that you could

• 09:33

buy for like a few dollars and it would have an 80% chance to get this, what would normally

• 09:38

be like a 1% chance to get the tree thing.

• 09:41

And I'm like, you have players and you have guilds and you have people that devote literally

• 09:48

countless hours to setting up infrastructure on farms and to get this particular item.

• 09:53

And it's the backbone of the economy.

• 09:56

And you introduce this in the cash shop.

• 09:59

Are you guys crazy?

• 10:01

Like I lost half my guild when that happened.

• 10:03

So anyways, like that was this, that was like the staging point for me to start thinking

• 10:08

about it.

• 10:09

It wasn't just a seed.

• 10:10

It was the seed for Ashes of Creation as well.

• 10:12

Is that what you're saying?

• 10:14

It was a seed for Ashes.

• 10:15

That's a guy I never thought about that.

• 10:16

It was literally the seed for Ashes of Creation.

• 10:18

Now I was like, this, this is why I wanted to start, you know, my own company to create

• 10:25

my own project.

• 10:26

And luckily it was serendipitous because, you know, I lived in San Diego and a lot of

• 10:30

our team, which we have an unbelievably amazingly talented team.

• 10:33

A lot of them come from, you know, they're ex Sony guys and they worked on like Everquest

• 10:37

and Star Wars Galaxies and DC Universe and stuff like that.

• 10:41

So we have a lot of incredible talent and it was really fortunate, you know, to be in

• 10:45

San Diego and be able to attract that talent.

• 10:47

But yeah, no, I mean, from, from a perspective like the backbone of the design of Ashes of

• 10:51

Creation is the node system.

• 10:54

Right.

• 10:55

And the node system is all about like how, when I was thinking about the general designs

• 10:59

for Ashes, I was like, how can we incorporate a system that helps to develop the world and

• 11:05

not just like the buzzwords that we've always heard, like, you know, player driven world

• 11:10

and you know, these, all these like living breathing, right?

• 11:14

Exactly.

• 11:15

Right.

• 11:16

Yeah, exactly.

• 11:17

And then you get in and it's just like, no, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm on another theme park ride.

• 11:20

Like I'm going from point A to point B and then, you know, those previous stations don't

• 11:24

matter in my experience.

• 11:26

But like, how can we keep the world changing?

• 11:29

And nodes was one of those systems that actually I had incorporated in a previous, I don't

• 11:35

know if you guys ever play like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder or any of that stuff.

• 11:40

Oh yeah.

• 11:41

So I'm like a huge Pathfinder fan.

• 11:42

I love D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder did, in my opinion, did a great job of like extending that, that

• 11:48

rule set.

• 11:49

And there's a particular system or book in Pathfinder that allows you to like set up

• 11:53

city development so that players like during the off week, they can like message the GM

• 11:57

and I was often the GM for these campaigns.

• 11:59

And so I started with the idea for Ashes of Creation actually was a custom Pathfinder

• 12:03

campaign.

• 12:04

So they would like send me like, Hey, I'm setting up a business.

• 12:06

I have like the leadership feat at seventh level.

• 12:09

I've attracted this amount of followers and I have my cohort and they're like setting

• 12:13

up this tavern and I want to attract like people to my village.

• 12:16

And I was like, all right, you know, I'm going to create some custom rule sets around like

• 12:19

how, you know, village progression can work and like, you know, is that going to become

• 12:23

a thriving metropolis over time?

• 12:25

And like, you know, how do story arcs hook into that and quest lines, you know, spawn

• 12:29

from that based on like the location of that particular village you decided, did you put

• 12:33

it near like, you know, Fanghorn Forest or something, or did you put it across the mountain

• 12:37

and like, how does that influence the encounters that you guys are going to have and stuff

• 12:40

like that.

• 12:41

So that was like the starting point for me from a design perspective on node systems,

• 12:45

but node systems, you know, they're not like any unique, difficult technology, you know

• 12:51

what I mean?

• 12:52

They're utilizing existing tech and they're relatively easy to stand up.

• 12:57

It's really about the content because what I've experienced, I don't know if you guys

• 13:01

have as well, but like when you talk about sandbox games, I've always oftentimes experienced

• 13:08

in sandbox games that it was an excuse for the developers to kind of like not create

• 13:11

a lot of curated content, but rather rely on players to have this like player driven

• 13:15

mechanics, like political ones or, you know, crafting and stuff like that and not necessarily

• 13:22

have to have a lot of storylines.

• 13:24

But I've always felt that that was cheap because if you're going to offer the player doors

• 13:28

and add behind every door is just the player doing more things and not something that's

• 13:32

given to them as a story, as an encounter, as content per se, then it's kind of a meaningless

• 13:38

choice.

• 13:39

So the nodes are really just a hallway of doors.

• 13:44

You know, those behind every door is a different type of content.

• 13:48

And depending on how the communities determine which nodes they're going to progress, which

• 13:54

cultures are the primary contributor to that, you know, nodes reflect those cultures, nodes

• 13:59

reflect those decisions, and it offers those doors that have then the different types of

• 14:05

raid boss, the different spawn tables that happen, the different reward tables, organizations

• 14:10

that get introduced, whether it be religious or or guild oriented, you know, all of these

• 14:15

systems through the nodes is how we kind of surface content to the players.

• 14:20

And it's an integral component of the world's development.

• 14:23

So standing that up was like our first objective.

• 14:25

I think it was like back in 2017, you know, we had our first like node experience collection

• 14:32

because nodes have these zones of influence around them that kind of collect player activity,

• 14:37

whether you kill a monster or you, you know, harvest a resource or you do they do nodes

• 14:43

do collect taxes.

• 14:44

Yes.

• 14:45

So nodes have player governments, and they have different types of elections that can

• 14:50

exist right now in alpha, you're going to experience the scientific government.

• 14:55

And that is essentially players become citizens, they must own property to become citizens.

• 14:59

There's three ways that you can own property, whether through an instance department building

• 15:02

that the government can elect to build static housing that exists within the node or freehold

• 15:09

systems that players can place down.

• 15:11

When they have that property, they may then apply for a citizenship, you may only ever

• 15:14

have a citizenship to one node.

• 15:17

And that grants you certain access to different types of content, wheels, then you elect a

• 15:22

government and the scientific method is through democratic election, we have military nodes

• 15:26

that actually are arena, you fight to the death for the mayor.

• 15:30

We have religious, which is more service oriented, kind of repeated quest completions.

• 15:35

And then you have economic, which is kind of oligarch, oligarchal, kind of like an oligarchy,

• 15:42

where you kind of bid for the for the mayorship, and then the mayor can select the tax rate

• 15:46

that tax rate gets applied to merchants that gets applied to purchasing a property, it

• 15:52

gets applied to different services.

• 15:55

And then that those tax a portion of those taxes actually flow up to the governing castle

• 15:58

as well.

• 16:00

So there's five regions over the primary world, and each region has a castle that has influence

• 16:05

over the nodes, and they collect a portion of those taxes as well.

• 16:08

Okay, so a random person in chat actually just asked this question.

• 16:12

So I wanted to ask you really quickly, if your friend is a very popular streamer, could

• 16:17

it like, let's say your best friend is a really popular streamer, could you profit off of

• 16:23

the taxes which he charges?

• 16:25

No, so the taxes when applied to a node actually are kept within the nodes coffers and must

• 16:32

be spent on specific services and or defenses that can apply to the node.

• 16:36

So it's not like, oh, I get elected as mayor, I'm gonna collect these taxes, and now I'm

• 16:40

just gonna pocket the money.

• 16:41

You know, there's no corruption.

• 16:43

You considered changing them?

• 16:44

Okay, there's no corruption.

• 16:46

Wow.

• 16:47

Okay, to be fair, the player, okay, to be fair, there could be underhanded tax rates.

• 16:53

So there could be underhanded tax rates.

• 16:55

So let's say I have two available trade agreements that I can create with different nodes nearby.

• 17:03

Let me talk to the mayor or the guild that's predominant there, and let me see what they're

• 17:08

willing to put in place to make sure that I can create a trade agreement with different

• 17:12

nodes.

• 17:13

Okay, so let's say I have two available trade agreements that I can create with different

• 17:17

nodes nearby.

• 17:18

Let me talk to the mayor or the guild that's predominant there, and let me see what they're

• 17:23

willing to provide me in order to influence what trade agreement I decide to set up.

• 17:30

So there could be some systems that take into account a little bit of a little bit of underhanded

• 17:38

tactics there.

• 17:39

Well, it's just a give and take, you know, that's really all it is.

• 17:42

It makes perfect sense.

• 17:43

So for anybody who's not as familiar with the node system, let's say your node is next

• 17:48

to a node, what is the evolution cycle of that node?

• 17:51

Right, so nodes share different, so okay, in a base state, a node is not present.

• 17:58

So like you're walking across the world, you don't see a node there, you see a landscape,

• 18:01

you see some monsters and stuff like that.

• 18:04

As you begin to do things, and the node is collecting experience in the background, you

• 18:09

know, it's going to propagate or threshold up to like a crossroads.

• 18:12

Now you're going to get some NPCs there, the NPCs are going to indicate to you what type

• 18:15

of node it is, right?

• 18:16

Are they going to be military, you know, are they going to be scholars, are they going

• 18:18

to be priests, are they going to be military people, right?

• 18:21

So then you're going to get an idea, okay, well, I know now what type of node this is,

• 18:24

do I want to continue my efforts in helping to, you know, create this node, so to speak,

• 18:29

there's going to be new systems and services that come online, there's going to be new

• 18:33

merchants that are there at each stage, there's going to be new quest lines, and those quest

• 18:37

lines are going to pull from the surrounding area, right?

• 18:39

So nodes share points of interest, right?

• 18:44

And points of interest get placed kind of in a form across the world, and as nodes advance,

• 18:51

when they get to that village stage, their borders are constantly growing, and they're

• 18:56

locking out neighboring nodes from advancing as well.

• 18:59

So we have 103 total different nodes that will exist in the world at launch.

• 19:04

And when they reach a certain stage, they start to activate that government system,

• 19:08

that citizenship that's at stage three, they can go all the way from a crossroads to an

• 19:12

development, to a village, to a town, to a city, eventually a metropolis, right?

• 19:15

And a metropolis is going to cover or have influence over one fifth of the total world

• 19:19

size.

• 19:20

So as at each stage, they're then accessing and spawning new things at the nearby points

• 19:26

of interest when their culture expands to incorporate that point of interest.

• 19:31

So that means that quest hooks are going to relate location-wise to the nearby points

• 19:35

of interest.

• 19:36

So for example, if your village advances near a mountain, like you said, maybe there's going

• 19:39

to be mines as a dungeon, or there's going to be certain types of mountainous foes that

• 19:45

come out in events and try to attack the nodes and disable services of buildings or kill

• 19:50

certain-

• 19:51

Like a dragon?

• 19:52

Yeah, like a dragon, exactly, right?

• 19:53

Or if you're near a harbor, it might be a kraken.

• 19:56

These are the types of advancements that reflect kind of the way the server's going to evolve.

• 20:02

And the cool thing I think about how nodes interface with the server progression is that

• 20:10

each server is going to experience different types of progressions.

• 20:13

And that's something that's cool to me too, because historically in MMOs I've played,

• 20:17

I don't know about you guys, but each server's the same, and the new player experience follows

• 20:24

generally the same path that players who came before experienced.

• 20:29

And that can be kind of cool because you have some familiarity, but at the same time it

• 20:33

can be a little lackluster because all the guides online, like you know exactly what

• 20:37

you're getting into, there's no exploration, there's no adventure, there's like, all right,

• 20:42

let me just rush through these beginning content areas and these core quest lines so that I

• 20:47

can get to the quote unquote end game of the MMORPG.

• 20:52

What nodes provide is it's very likely since it's based off player heat mapping in the

• 20:56

world that for the first six months of a particular server's lifespan, you're going to have the

• 21:01

majority of the large nodes exist near the starting areas.

• 21:04

So you're not going to experience what traditionally has been a problem for MMORPGs where you enter

• 21:09

the world and the biggest attraction of the MMO, which is that social interaction, is

• 21:14

not present for you for the first 50 levels because nobody else is there.

• 21:19

That's the crappy thing I've experienced, partly why I don't like to even join MMOs

• 21:24

that launch after six months.

• 21:26

I want to be there when they're ready.

• 21:27

Yeah, exactly.

• 21:28

You're late to the party.

• 21:29

Playing a game on day one feels so good, man.

• 21:32

Like it's awesome.

• 21:33

Everybody's doing the same thing.

• 21:35

Everybody wants to do everything.

• 21:37

I love that.

• 21:38

And so you're saying that each server is going to have its own different way that it evolves.

• 21:42

So for example, like with a lot of games, like you have stage one, two, three, and four,

• 21:47

and most servers just go through one, two, three, and four.

• 21:51

And what you're saying is there could be stage A, B, C, or D. They're completely different

• 21:55

directions.

• 21:56

And not only that, but actually those stages are regionalized.

• 22:00

So for example, one particular region of the map might be more advanced than the far side

• 22:06

of the map.

• 22:07

So it's kind of based on how the player population moves.

• 22:11

So for example, if there are different starting areas, like we have different starting areas

• 22:14

based on kind of the race because players are returning to this kind of forsaken world

• 22:18

that's had an apocalyptic history.

• 22:21

The primary antagonists are these kind of firstborn of the gods that turned to the dark

• 22:27

side and like they came in these harbinger comets and like landed on this planet and

• 22:33

they killed off the children of the gods, the dwarves, the elves, the humans, and the

• 22:39

orcs.

• 22:40

And then they evacuated this planet of Vera to Sanctus and through the portals.

• 22:45

And now they're returning thousands of years later because the goddess of creation's avatar

• 22:49

is this Phoenix and the spark of life is kind of bringing these people back to the world.

• 22:55

And now you're rediscovering what was your lost ancestor's home and these adversaries

• 23:01

that are just filled with corruption are like perverting every part of the landscape.

• 23:07

So based on how player population looks and where players choose to start, because you

• 23:12

can select a race like human, but not necessarily have to start at the human starting area.

• 23:17

You can choose to start at a different portal because you're coming from Sanctus, right?

• 23:22

And based on how different server populations evolve will determine how that heat map of

• 23:28

node progression exists in that particular server.

• 23:31

And it's going to completely change the dynamic of what that world looks like from a regionality

• 23:37

standpoint.

• 23:38

And one of the things I was saying was like, you know, that problem of entering into that

• 23:42

empty landscape of starting areas isn't going to be present in Ashes because those starting

• 23:47

areas will likely be the most advanced nodes over the first like six months, let's say,

• 23:51

of a server's lifetime.

• 23:52

So as players join in, they're going to be in a highly populated area where end game

• 23:58

players or higher level players are coming back to that node to receive the quest lines,

• 24:04

to participate in organizations, that's their guild hall locations.

• 24:07

Like you're going to be thrust into the middle of this highly social environment where players

• 24:12

are all around you while you're doing your early level stuff.

• 24:16

And actually that early level stuff is going to be compounded by the opportunities you

• 24:20

now have at this node that's been established nearby that people in a linear history didn't

• 24:25

get to experience when they first started the game.

• 24:28

It's going to be a completely different experience for players six months down the road than

• 24:32

it will be for players who were there on day one.

• 24:35

And I think that's a cool kind of history that is unique.

• 24:42

It's not the same process every time.

• 24:44

Exactly.

• 24:45

Yeah.

• 24:46

Like different servers.

• 24:47

I was going to say, I was to say the same thing as you, Rich, I think.

• 24:51

Is it that you RP in different places on different servers?

• 24:55

Yeah.

• 24:56

And it's like each server has its own story.

• 24:58

And so if you're plying on one server and you want to reroll on another server, you're

• 25:02

going to have a slightly different Ashes of Creation experience.

• 25:06

Exactly.

• 25:07

Okay.

• 25:08

Okay.

• 25:09

So I want to do a little thought experiment.

• 25:11

This one might be a little bit tricky because everything with the nodes sounds very exciting

• 25:14

to a player like me as well.

• 25:16

But let's pretend, like let's pretend for a second that I'm an idiot and I'm not really

• 25:23

great at understanding systems or playing video games in general.

• 25:28

And I'm just walking through the world and the nodes are, can you be a player and not

• 25:34

really understand the nodes and still enjoy the game and just take it as it comes?

• 25:39

Yeah, absolutely.

• 25:40

So, I mean, when you think about what is your normal MMO experience that we have as MMO?

• 25:47

Okay.

• 25:48

So the MMO player base is typically an aging demographic.

• 25:51

Unfortunately, right now, over the last decade, newer generation of gamers have joined different

• 25:59

genres and they didn't get the experience of being a part of major MMORPG launch and

• 26:06

like that unique social component that MMOs provide.

• 26:10

And so they don't really know what it's like to be part of that.

• 26:16

That standard kind of experience is like, all right, I'm getting in, I have my adventure

• 26:20

in class, I'm going to go out there and like fight monsters, I'm going to progress, I'm

• 26:24

going to acquire gear, I'm going to make friends, I'm going to go from these kind of quest points

• 26:31

to quest points and I'm going to explore this world that I've never seen before and I'm

• 26:35

going to come across like materials in the world that I want to gather and then sell

• 26:39

into the economy.

• 26:40

Like all of those systems exist without nodes progressing.

• 26:45

So that normal kind of progression will exist.

• 26:49

The thing about nodes is as you're doing that normal progression, the nodes are growing

• 26:54

with you based on every one of those types of actions, right?

• 26:57

They're collecting that experience that you collect as well and that all the other players

• 27:01

around collect.

• 27:02

So it'll be relatively easy for Crossroads to start spawning all over the world and then

• 27:07

it'll be a little bit more difficult for encampments to spawn and maybe a little bit more difficult

• 27:11

for villages and so on and so forth.

• 27:12

So like you can expect on day one Crossroads are going to be present immediately.

• 27:17

You can expect probably on day two that some encampments are going to spawn up and then

• 27:20

maybe it'll take like day five or seven for some villages to spawn and then maybe it'll

• 27:24

take a couple of weeks for like a town to get up there and then maybe it'll take a month

• 27:28

for a city and then a month and a half for a metropolis, right?

• 27:31

Like these are the types of ideas we have for how node progression will work and complement

• 27:38

what the traditional game loop of an MMORPG is.

• 27:42

It's not to necessarily reinvent the wheel.

• 27:47

We want to have some familiarity as MMORPG gamers.

• 27:51

I mean that's what makes MMOs MMOs.

• 27:53

So you keep that familiarity and then you innovate in ways that complement and that's

• 27:59

how the node systems kind of do that.

• 28:01

Yeah, so one of my questions is really going to be like how the main story quest like actually

• 28:08

evolves like does it avoid us?

• 28:10

For example, I've been playing a game Final Fantasy and there are some unique things in

• 28:15

that story.

• 28:16

Like for example, in my playthrough Y'shtlata is my girlfriend and like nobody else has

• 28:20

had that experience when they actually play the game.

• 28:22

That's true actually because she's my wife in my playthrough.

• 28:26

We'll talk about this later.

• 28:27

We'll talk about this all the time.

• 28:30

The thing that I'm curious about is let's say the nodes on one server are state A and

• 28:36

then the nodes on another server state B is a player still going to have the same main

• 28:41

story quest that introduces them to the world and introduces them to the lore?

• 28:44

Yeah, I think you kind of tell stories in different ways, right?

• 28:48

So we're all accustomed to having like an overarching storyline like why am I here?

• 28:55

What brought me to this realm so to speak?

• 28:59

What's my objective?

• 29:01

What are the like threats that are not just apply to me but apply to my compatriots that

• 29:07

are playing with me, right?

• 29:09

That type of overarching storyline will exist.

• 29:11

But the way you get that more personalized approach is there's a few ways you can define

• 29:16

that.

• 29:17

You can define that based on culture.

• 29:18

Like we have nine different races in the game.

• 29:20

Each of those are going to have somewhat of a customized quest line that relates to their

• 29:26

races.

• 29:27

You have genders, you have classes, you have archetypes, you have organizations.

• 29:35

Each of those can personalize experiences so that even if you're on the same overarching

• 29:40

meta story, your experiences are different along that path because you are different

• 29:46

from Asmongold.

• 29:48

Asmongold might be playing a paladin human or something and Rich you're playing like

• 29:53

a mage elf and that's going to have different types of experiences.

• 29:59

Thanks for not making me a gnome.

• 30:00

Thank you for not making me a gnome.

• 30:01

I really do appreciate that.

• 30:02

Thank you very much.

• 30:03

Helms are taller than you are.

• 30:04

I apologize.

• 30:05

I think Asmongold, do you not traditionally play paladins?

• 30:10

Are you a warrior?

• 30:13

That's McConnell.

• 30:14

I'm the warrior.

• 30:15

Yeah, McConnell is the one who has to heal me.

• 30:17

He's the paladin.

• 30:18

I'm so sorry.

• 30:19

Yeah, well let me live that down.

• 30:22

It's okay.

• 30:24

I'm used to it.

• 30:25

It's fine.

• 30:26

A paladin is a paladin.

• 30:28

Actually Asmongold, I asked my character team to provide some hairstyles for you just so

• 30:37

that you could take a look kind of what we have in store and I don't know if Paki could

• 30:45

provide.

• 30:46

Oh, there we go.

• 30:47

I'm so really glad that we've spent all this time hiring a production team for the show.

• 30:53

This really is just so great.

• 30:55

I'm glad.

• 30:56

Really, I'm flattered, Stephen.

• 30:58

This is incredible.

• 30:59

Well, if you just want, I mean there's some subtle differences between these hairstyles.

• 31:04

There's a few of them.

• 31:05

I love how he didn't know that you were a warrior, but he knew you were bald.

• 31:12

Okay.

• 31:13

All right.

• 31:14

That's crazy.

• 31:15

There's more.

• 31:16

There's more.

• 31:17

There's more.

• 31:18

And again, you want to focus on the subtleties between the hairstyles because they're really

• 31:22

hard to see.

• 31:23

Yeah, I see that.

• 31:24

You see the peach fuzz on that one?

• 31:26

That one's...

• 31:27

Oh yeah.

• 31:28

Yeah, it's been a few days since he's had to shave his head.

• 31:31

Of course.

• 31:32

Yeah.

• 31:33

I'm fully aware of that.

• 31:34

I had them whip those up real quick just this morning.

• 31:36

Yeah.

• 31:37

I've had a lot of notice.

• 31:38

It was last night I found out I was going to be on the show.

• 31:41

Yeah.

• 31:42

The team, what a great job your team is doing, man.

• 31:45

That's just great.

• 31:46

The artwork, absolutely phenomenal.

• 31:49

Yeah.

• 31:50

Oh man.

• 31:51

Yeah.

• 31:52

I want to talk about gear and I haven't had a chance really to ever talk to you about

• 31:58

the game too much.

• 32:00

I think maybe we had like five or 10 minutes one time where I got to ask you a few questions,

• 32:05

but I did get to watch all the interviews you've done.

• 32:07

I've been watching the updates that you guys have been doing.

• 32:09

I feel like the reward system in the game has been one that I don't fully understand

• 32:16

yet, but everything that I've heard I'm very interested in.

• 32:19

For anyone who maybe hasn't been following as much, what can they expect from the actual

• 32:24

reward system in the game, whether it's getting gear from dungeons or anything?

• 32:29

Yeah.

• 32:30

We have, again, some pretty traditional approaches to how gear is going to be surfaced for players.

• 32:37

Obviously, you're going to have quest lines that provide a certain level of gears.

• 32:41

You're going to have gear that drops from monsters on a rare basis.

• 32:46

You're going to have legendary gear that's going to be best in slot from legendary world

• 32:52

bosses.

• 32:53

Then what's comparable to those best in slots is going to also be top tier crafted gear

• 32:57

as well.

• 32:58

The crafting system or artisanship system is actually three-tiered.

• 33:02

You have gathering, you have processing, and then you have actual crafting.

• 33:08

You cannot be a master of all of those.

• 33:10

You really have to pinpoint where you're going to focus your mastery in.

• 33:14

What that does is it creates an interdependency in the economy between different focuses from

• 33:19

players and you have to work together to create these top tier items from a crafting system.

• 33:29

On top of that as well, we're going to also have gear that's accomplished through title

• 33:34

acquisition.

• 33:36

For example, certain nodes will have patron religions.

• 33:40

They'll have patron organizations like the Thieves Guild or Scholars Academy.

• 33:45

Players will be able to progress within those organizations or religions.

• 33:49

As they progress in them, they'll achieve unique titles or for example, the owner of

• 33:53

a castle, the king or queen of a castle, or the mayor of a node.

• 33:57

Those unique titles will also grant access to gear that is high quality and is only accessible

• 34:06

so long as you hold that title.

• 34:09

It's important to keep up with the citizens that either elected you or accomplishing winning

• 34:15

the castle siege or making sure that nobody surpasses you in the organization that you're

• 34:21

a part of.

• 34:22

Those are our primary methods.

• 34:24

Obviously, you're going to have base gear acquisition through merchants as well that

• 34:28

you can purchase and acquire.

• 34:30

I remember hearing in, this was a very early interview, but that there were actual performance

• 34:37

checks inside of instance content where if you were able to not just get the boss down

• 34:45

but achieve it.

• 34:46

Like the difficulty thresholds?

• 34:47

Yeah.

• 34:48

Is that going to have a big impact on rewards as well?

• 34:51

Yeah.

• 34:52

Essentially, as you progress through, let's say dungeons or different types of encounters,

• 34:59

the way we're approaching our NPC AI or our behavior trees for different monsters and

• 35:05

or bosses is obviously there's going to be phased based responses and difficulties that

• 35:14

you're going to have to overcome based on the monster's health or the boss's health.

• 35:19

But there's also going to be certain key performance indicators that's looked at from the participation

• 35:25

of a particular group or raid.

• 35:28

And whether, let's say players come with too many players, that's going to activate additional

• 35:32

AOE abilities, it's going to activate additional terrain hazards and environmental hazards.

• 35:38

There might be traps that get spawned.

• 35:40

And as players face the threat in front of them, depending on their performance, and

• 35:45

that performance can be related to hit points lost, it can be related to number of deaths

• 35:50

that happen, it can be related to speed.

• 35:55

There's a lot of different points of information we want to incorporate as part of these encounters

• 36:01

and how they scale difficulty.

• 36:02

And I'm not talking like scaling in the sense of like, what we're used to in other games.

• 36:08

I hate that type of scaling where it's like, oh, you know, you're just facing the same

• 36:11

monster at a different level.

• 36:12

And now like it's damage output and health.

• 36:15

Exactly.

• 36:16

Yeah.

• 36:17

That's kind of boring, and it doesn't make sense.

• 36:19

But if it's a strategy perspective, right, like the monster's now utilizing some of its

• 36:24

environmental hazards and traps, or it's like, you know, having different types of strategies

• 36:29

and what type of skill usage and the cycle of that skill usage.

• 36:33

And like, you know, you're not going to come and just tank and spank the same encounter

• 36:36

over and over and know the mechanics every single time because those mechanics might

• 36:41

change.

• 36:42

You know, that's, I think, something that's going to be cool.

• 36:45

And then based on your performance, it could impact the reward table of that particular

• 36:51

encounter as well.

• 36:53

So like, you know, if you're encountering the monster at its highest difficulty setting,

• 36:58

per se, because of your performance as part of progression in that encounter, you know,

• 37:03

that might change the reward tables.

• 37:04

But we're still playing with that.

• 37:06

I think that's something that's important.

• 37:07

You know, the whole purpose of alphas and betas is to obviously test these ideas, these

• 37:10

theories and see how we actually want to approach them.

• 37:13

But I think it's a unique way.

• 37:16

It's a different approach that I haven't experienced in MMOs previously.

• 37:19

And I think it kind of raises the stakes a little bit in strategizing your approach to

• 37:24

these encounters.

• 37:25

I think that's really interesting.

• 37:27

Like I can give like an example in WoW, like there were a few fights in Oldoar where if

• 37:31

you did them a certain way or if you killed them fast enough and unlocked hard mode loot.

• 37:36

And I always thought those were some of the coolest and most interesting mechanics that

• 37:40

the game ever had to offer because it wasn't something that you clicked a button for.

• 37:43

It wasn't something that you activated in a menu.

• 37:47

It was just something that you played the game and created by yourself.

• 37:50

And I think it just creates that immersion.

• 37:52

I love that idea.

• 37:53

I got banned for four towers Flame Leviathan, actually.

• 37:56

Because you cheated with an ability that was bugged.

• 37:59

World first.

• 38:00

World first.

• 38:01

That's what matters, right?

• 38:02

I still got it.

• 38:04

And I also got a three day vacation right after.

• 38:07

But yeah, I think that those are some of my favorite fights as well, looking back and

• 38:12

thinking about it.

• 38:13

So that is a really cool thing.

• 38:15

But you mentioned it's something that is still getting worked on.

• 38:18

You're still tweaking on the refuning knobs and things like that.

• 38:21

One of my biggest questions with the game of this scope, and we're talking about fantastic

• 38:26

storytelling and world building.

• 38:28

We're talking about how the loot is going to work, big crafting systems, political systems,

• 38:32

religion systems, nodes, all of these things.

• 38:35

Do you think that there is a chance that in the alpha or in later testing that happens

• 38:41

that some of these systems might not make it to life?

• 38:44

Is there a chance that some of the darlings need to be killed?

• 38:47

Or do you think that the systems that we're seeing in the alphas are only going to be

• 38:51

worked on and refined?

• 38:53

Yeah.

• 38:54

I think that any good development is cognizant of the fact that some of your intentions might

• 39:02

need to be rethought.

• 39:05

And I think the whole, like I said, the whole purpose of alphas and betas are to test those

• 39:10

ideas because what happens on paper doesn't always happen in reality.

• 39:18

And you can have this pristine view of what you want to do, and that can change in a moment's

• 39:26

notice when you see player activity doesn't go the way you expected it would go.

• 39:31

So I think part of the important part of having this whole transparent development is a two-way

• 39:42

street of expectation from the developers to the players and the players to developers.

• 39:46

From the developer side, we have this expectation that content creators and players and testers

• 39:52

are going to surface this test with the right expectation.

• 39:56

Like, hey, this is an alpha, things can change.

• 40:02

This isn't a content test.

• 40:03

We're testing core systems.

• 40:07

That's an important part to communicate.

• 40:08

And then on the flip side of that, the players need to provide feedback.

• 40:11

They need to provide thoughts and kind of what changes they'd like to see and the intentions

• 40:18

for particular systems.

• 40:19

And that dialogue is what surfaces potential change for what our intents were to begin

• 40:25

with.

• 40:26

Right?

• 40:27

And if you're not willing to make the change, then what's the point of the dialogue?

• 40:32

That makes a lot of sense.

• 40:33

I definitely agree with that.

• 40:35

Yeah, yeah.

• 40:36

It's funny because if you talked to me three weeks ago, you would have heard one of the

• 40:41

saddest boys ever.

• 40:43

As somebody who's loved MMOs for a really long time, I felt like there really was no

• 40:48

light at the end of the tunnel.

• 40:50

And then all of a sudden, Final Fantasy randomly, Asmins starts playing it.

• 40:55

And it felt like there was this true awakening where, wait, the MMO community hasn't gone

• 41:00

anywhere.

• 41:01

People still do want MMOs.

• 41:04

And it's just, we've been playing bad ones.

• 41:07

I think that's been the issue, right?

• 41:09

It is like for a long time, I think the reason why the MMO genre has been dead is because

• 41:14

the people that made the games killed it.

• 41:17

And that's the reality.

• 41:18

I mean, there's just been tons of games that have these, Steven, as you were saying, right?

• 41:23

These oppressive monetization systems where you're just buying these things that invalidate

• 41:28

player effort.

• 41:30

And these types of things I feel are just so demoralizing to a player, especially whenever

• 41:35

you take a type of game that's built around time investment, a type of game that's built

• 41:40

around emotional and personal investment, and then you take that and you reduce that

• 41:44

to like a monetary amount.

• 41:45

There's no surprise.

• 41:46

And honestly, it's really nice to see things changing now.

• 41:49

It really is.

• 41:50

I have to be careful because I got myself in trouble.

• 41:53

I remember.

• 41:54

Yes, the message.

• 41:56

Because I'm a player first, I feel.

• 42:00

I have similar opinions.

• 42:03

Trust me, I've got myself in some trouble before, too.

• 42:07

I know we don't know each other very well, but I used to have a job six times and it

• 42:12

never ended well.

• 42:15

I can't tell you enough how much I resonate with what you just said there.

• 42:23

I think one important note, though, is in my experience over the last five years now,

• 42:30

or five or six years now, having started a development company, is that I don't place

• 42:38

that blame on the developers.

• 42:40

Like the developers, so the people making the game, I don't place the blame on.

• 42:45

I place the blame for that type of short-sightedness and just general ignorance on more the corporate

• 42:57

orchestrators.

• 42:58

Obviously, companies, okay, one of the great things I feel about Intrepid and Ashes of

• 43:05

Creation is that I don't have investors or shareholders that I have to answer to.

• 43:12

At the same time, the other companies, when they make these types of monetization decisions,

• 43:16

they're focused on the bottom line and how they can essentially service their shareholders.

• 43:28

They have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.

• 43:30

But the problem is with that philosophy, in my opinion, is that what do MMOs do great?

• 43:36

And really, it's retention.

• 43:38

New player acquisition, not so much.

• 43:41

That's a difficult subject a lot of times for MMOs.

• 43:44

But when it comes to the social elasticity and the retention that's there, it's like,

• 43:51

let's focus on making the game and the content really good and releasing those patches and

• 43:56

those updates and just listening to what the player base is saying.

• 44:02

Because at the end of the day, your player base is the only reason you have revenue.

• 44:08

So if you're going to continually thumb your nose at your player base and just say, essentially,

• 44:15

hey, we're not listening to you.

• 44:17

We're just going to sell this new shop item that destabilizes the game economy and lose

• 44:22

another half a million subscribers or whatever.

• 44:27

How does that translate to long term return to your shareholders?

• 44:31

I don't understand that aspect.

• 44:34

But yeah, that's always effectively the shareholders.

• 44:37

Yeah, that's always one of the questions that I used to bring up when Zach and I would have

• 44:42

long, you call them conversations or complaining tangents.

• 44:46

I'm not really sure what we should call them.

• 44:48

But we would have our long conversations about the game both on and off stream.

• 44:53

And a lot of the time where I would disagree with Zach, sometimes I was like, no, I don't

• 44:57

think that there's necessarily it's not necessarily them trying to live up to their duty.

• 45:02

They have to just be bad at making the game, because if they were trying to live up to

• 45:07

their duty, you need to make the best game possible.

• 45:09

You need to have that stable platform to actually have the players even want to spend money.

• 45:13

I'm the biggest whale ever.

• 45:15

I think it's I think it's one of the cases where they have to meet like a like a deadline.

• 45:22

They have to have this released in Q4.

• 45:25

They have to have this release by the end of the year.

• 45:27

And the goal of doing that causes them to cut corners.

• 45:32

That's what I believe.

• 45:33

Maybe I mean, like, Steven, I literally if the game is good.

• 45:37

I bought I think I bought close to 100 bottles of Fantasia and Final Fantasy last night.

• 45:42

I was trying to help the Asmin install, like, like actually just put his code on the game.

• 45:47

And I just went to the cash shop for no reason and bought pots and pots of dye.

• 45:52

I stopped playing Genshin Impact, but I still log in just every now and then to just gambar

• 45:56

a couple of crystals.

• 45:58

I'm playing Raid Shadow Legends right now on three of my phones.

• 46:01

I have a I have a legitimate problem.

• 46:03

But you know what?

• 46:04

I didn't buy microtransactions in.

• 46:06

Wow.

• 46:07

Because I just at that point, I just wasn't feeling it anymore.

• 46:12

And it felt like a lot of the spending.

• 46:15

It almost felt like I don't know.

• 46:17

It was like there's no when I spend money in POE, for example, I'm like, I helped the

• 46:22

game like I'm happy about it.

• 46:23

Do you feel like there is a good balance of microtransactions at all?

• 46:28

Or do you think that all in all, there's something that you kind of want to avoid?

• 46:32

You know, that's a that's a good question, because over the past, you know, years that

• 46:36

we've been in development, you know, even though I'm fully funding the project, we still

• 46:41

offer preorder packs.

• 46:43

And I always tell people like, hey, if you're skeptical, like if you just want to watch

• 46:47

how the game, you know, pans out, you're not losing anything by not preordering.

• 46:51

All we're selling really is like advanced game time and some cosmetics.

• 46:54

There's no there's no like, you know, game altering mechanics.

• 46:57

There's no quality of life.

• 46:59

There's no pay to win.

• 47:02

Like there's nothing that actually impacts the the in game progression and stuff like

• 47:06

that.

• 47:07

There are there are cosmetics and then there's game time.

• 47:08

So I tell people like sit back, you know, watch the development, you know, join the

• 47:11

community, come on discord, go on the forums, give us your feedback.

• 47:15

Like, you know, the whole purpose of opening up NDA in this state, which is super bare

• 47:20

bones and super early, is so that everybody can participate, not just the testers, but

• 47:24

like anybody watching can go and like give, you know, opinions and stuff.

• 47:29

But like, when I think about the approach that I took with our monetization practice,

• 47:35

in my opinion, you want to have, okay, there's there's like three approaches generally to

• 47:40

MMOs.

• 47:41

Either you can have a free to play game.

• 47:43

And then when you have that free to play game, unfortunately, you have to incorporate aspects

• 47:47

in which you're going to capture revenue.

• 47:48

Right.

• 47:49

And those and generally in the free to play games, you know, the aspect you're going to

• 47:53

take is incorporating some type of power or falsely creating a quality of life issue in

• 47:59

order to sell a quality of life item.

• 48:01

Right.

• 48:02

Like, and that's just not a good experience from a player's perspective.

• 48:05

Like that's what we hate, in my opinion.

• 48:08

The second component is you can incorporate a buy to play, right?

• 48:11

You can have a box price and then you can incorporate that box price per expansion.

• 48:16

And like, you know, then the beats of development really occur around those expansion launches.

• 48:22

And that's when you get into the issues of like, all right, we need to hit our marketing

• 48:25

deadline or we can't necessarily take the time on this expansion.

• 48:29

We got to cut stuff because we need a revenue event to occur within a quarter or within

• 48:34

a, you know, two quarters or whatever.

• 48:35

Right.

• 48:36

And that can create some problems as well.

• 48:38

And then in addition, buy to plays can also be a high barrier to entry.

• 48:41

Right.

• 48:42

Like, I don't know if I'm going to like this MMORPG per se.

• 48:44

Should I drop 50 bucks on the MMO and then I play a few hours and it's like not my thing

• 48:49

and you know, now I'm out 50 bucks.

• 48:53

Like that's the buy to play.

• 48:54

The third is obviously subscription.

• 48:55

Right.

• 48:56

In my opinion, a subscription is the best model for a Western audience.

• 49:02

And the reason I feel that way is because the game is going to live or die on the ability

• 49:10

to retain users over that period of time, which means that the content and the core

• 49:16

gameplay loops need to be good.

• 49:19

So you have to, you can't just capture a purchaser at the buy to play and then don't care if

• 49:25

they leave and recoup the new audience, you know, right?

• 49:28

You have to continually feed content.

• 49:30

I mean, what do they say?

• 49:31

Like content is king.

• 49:34

And the reason content is king is because that's what's keeping the user engaged.

• 49:38

That's what's keeping them having fun.

• 49:40

That's what they get to experience with their friends and the social dynamic of it.

• 49:43

Like those are good things.

• 49:45

In addition, if in our model, we're a subscription without a box price, a lot of times companies

• 49:51

will try to double dip and they'll say, no, not only are we box price, but we're also

• 49:56

subscription on top of it.

• 49:59

And then now you run into the problem of, all right, hey, we have a game launch coming

• 50:04

up.

• 50:05

We want to attract as many users as possible.

• 50:07

And we want them to feel like this is a one month commitment, not a 50 or $60 purchase

• 50:12

per se that they need to shell out to experience the game.

• 50:16

And if they like it, if we've done our job as developers and where we have made a good

• 50:20

game, right, they will continue to subscribe.

• 50:24

And they will continue to subscribe so long as we provide additional content, make sure

• 50:28

that the servers are performing well, you know, all these different things.

• 50:30

It's an incentive for the company to perform.

• 50:33

And it is a service to the player that they don't have to shell out the large price of

• 50:37

a buy to play.

• 50:38

And they don't have to deal with the shitty quality of life or pay to win components that

• 50:41

come with free to play.

• 50:43

You know, that's kind of the approach we've taken.

• 50:46

So, if games choose to have like a cosmetic shop, I personally I'm okay with cosmetics.

• 50:54

I think that that cosmetics, you know, are a bridge between as long as let me just say

• 51:01

this, as long as the cosmetics cannot be transferable, so that you don't run into issues of players

• 51:05

purchasing cosmetics for the players services.

• 51:09

And as long as you have better cosmetics from a quality slash silhouette from just a general

• 51:16

appearance standpoint that it must be achieved in game, right?

• 51:20

You don't just want to like there's some games where I played where it's like, all right,

• 51:23

hey, we're going to really incentivize players to purchase our cosmetics in the shop because

• 51:27

all of our in game cosmetics are shit.

• 51:29

It looks like trash.

• 51:30

And the only good looking cosmetics are in the shop.

• 51:33

Like that is terrible.

• 51:35

But the reason for a reason for a cosmetic shop is because sometimes you have different

• 51:41

degrees of players.

• 51:42

You have casual players and you have hardcore players and the hardcore players, they can

• 51:46

achieve those, you know, items in game that take a lot of time to get.

• 51:52

And the casual players like maybe, you know, you're a dad of two children and you're working

• 51:57

your ass off and you only have a few hours each night and you know, you'll never get

• 52:00

the super legendary in game cosmetic achievement, but you want to look cool as well.

• 52:06

Okay.

• 52:07

Cosmetic shops can provide that.

• 52:09

So I'm okay with cosmetic shops as well.

• 52:12

I think they can be an okay complement to a kind of like an optionary expenditure.

• 52:18

But that's like that's my philosophy on monetization.

• 52:21

I think that's the best way to foster a good environment for the player base and the company

• 52:26

to continue to perform and the player base to enjoy without having to take the risks

• 52:30

of the free to play and the buy to play options.

• 52:32

You know, a game had the best like on like cosmetic unlock system out of any game and

• 52:38

everybody sleeps on it.

• 52:39

Everybody forgets about it.

• 52:40

The best MMORPG with cosmetic unlocks with City of Heroes and City of Villains.

• 52:44

That game had a fantastic unlock system.

• 52:48

And I feel like ever since then, there's been there have been some games have done a pretty

• 52:53

good job.

• 52:54

But that game.

• 52:55

Yeah, people are literally wh omega lulling me.

• 52:57

But that that game had a lot of a lot of really good unlocks.

• 53:02

And anytime I hear a developer starting to like, look at that, man, you had to be a really

• 53:07

good player to unlock those.

• 53:08

You know, I was sad I missed out on City of Heroes.

• 53:11

I think City of Heroes is NCSoft, right?

• 53:13

They Yeah, and that was cryptic.

• 53:15

And I think that that was where the problem was.

• 53:18

Because then there was like, NCSoft and cryptic had some sort of friction.

• 53:23

And they went to separate ways.

• 53:24

They made a new a few new games.

• 53:26

And then also, I think Ion, Tabula Rasa, and something else was all sitting under there

• 53:31

all at the same time.

• 53:32

Yeah, I was I think what City of Heroes was starting to get a little bigger, I was still

• 53:36

like deep in the in the lineage two scene, I really I was a huge lineage two player.

• 53:42

I loved lineage two.

• 53:43

I never really liked like faction based games where you're told like who your enemy is.

• 53:50

Because oftentimes, like in those games, I always felt like I disliked my own faction

• 53:54

more than the opposing faction.

• 53:56

And I wanted to like kill them just from a PvP perspective.

• 54:00

But then it like additionally, I feel like it just arbitrarily segmented the community.

• 54:04

Like it's like you automatically do not experience the social interaction with half of the game's

• 54:09

population.

• 54:10

It's like, you know, that's kind of I didn't I didn't like that.

• 54:13

So lineage was a non faction based game.

• 54:15

And it and it was a little bit more on the hardcore side.

• 54:18

It was also an NCSoft game.

• 54:21

And I personally liked the more hardcore nature of it.

• 54:25

Because it it made like, one of the big philosophies that I had with ashes is risk versus reward.

• 54:32

And sometimes when you're in that kind of grinding experience, you know, a lot of people

• 54:36

don't like grinding and I personally was a huge fan of grinding.

• 54:39

But I what I enjoyed was, is when I lost, I felt the bite of the loss more.

• 54:44

You know what I mean?

• 54:46

And that to have like a wieldy system like a wilderness like old school Runescape kind

• 54:50

of wilderness system to it.

• 54:54

I can't remember.

• 54:55

Is that what you meant by like the loss?

• 54:57

No, I mean, like when you died in lineage, you lost like 4% of your level and you had

• 55:01

an opportunity to like drop gear.

• 55:03

And this is like this is kind of crazy.

• 55:07

And I know I'm sure like many viewers gonna be like, damn, that's crazy.

• 55:10

Yeah.

• 55:11

But like, I when you were like max level and lineage, it took you like maybe a week to

• 55:16

recoup that 4%.

• 55:18

So when you got into like fights with other players, like you had to make a conscious

• 55:23

decision at that point.

• 55:24

It's like, all right, am I willing to spend, you know, a week or two weeks regaining what

• 55:28

I might lose here?

• 55:31

Like that's something that I need to know if I'm willing to do and now it's a whole

• 55:34

new calculation.

• 55:35

It's not just like, oh, yeah, I'll fight like I die.

• 55:37

I lose nothing.

• 55:38

You know, I come back, I respawn, whatever.

• 55:40

But like here, it's like, no, you're gonna have to grind this back out again.

• 55:44

So twice.

• 55:45

Yeah, I've had the same thing happen with Rust, where it's like, you have to assume

• 55:51

that if you lose this, you're losing all of your best weapons, all of your best armor.

• 55:56

And the other really interesting thing about a game like Rust is even if you win, you're

• 56:01

still gonna have to spend a bunch of rockets maybe for demolition, you're gonna have to

• 56:05

spend a bunch of ammo, and you're probably gonna lose some stuff.

• 56:09

And so is there gonna be any elements of that where there's some investment into the sieges,

• 56:15

because the sieges are probably one of the most interesting things to me.

• 56:19

I know, I think Lineage had those two and some other games have as well.

• 56:23

And I know that like for many MMOs, it's hard to see those.

• 56:27

It's hard for the first M to really happen, the massively multiplayer part.

• 56:31

That doesn't usually happen.

• 56:33

And so what is the scope of those sieges and how do those work?

• 56:37

So our intent for sieges is to have a 250 versus 250 battlefield.

• 56:42

And in alpha, we have achieved a battle of about 350 and the servers were performing

• 56:49

relatively well.

• 56:50

So we're pretty happy with that.

• 56:52

On the players side, there's still some additional rendering, culling and optimizations we have

• 56:59

to do on rendering, right?

• 57:01

So client performance is something we need to focus on that we haven't yet.

• 57:05

But on a network, and again, like I said, this is a primarily technical alpha where

• 57:10

we're testing a lot of our core architectures and systems.

• 57:15

So seeing that at this stage is very, very good for us.

• 57:19

Now, I would love to be able to push that to like a 500 versus 500, but I'm not, you

• 57:24

know, I don't make any promises to our community.

• 57:27

That's going to be our objective to see what we can do.

• 57:30

But that's kind of the intent there.

• 57:31

And you know, when you talk about like, what's generally going to be the player versus player

• 57:35

component, like from a PvE perspective, we have a lot of, you know, giant raid bosses,

• 57:41

world raid bosses and dungeons that you're going to progress through and the crafting

• 57:44

systems and like, you know, encountering of these scaling and difficulties and events

• 57:53

that occur like a lot of aspects there.

• 57:56

From a PvP perspective, we have a flagging system.

• 58:00

So generally what that means is like, in the open world, you can attack another player.

• 58:04

But if you kill another player, you're going to acquire corruption and corruption is a

• 58:08

super bad thing to have.

• 58:11

You're going to take four times the normal death penalties, you're going to potentially

• 58:13

drop your gear, you're going to be on the map for bounty hunters to find you.

• 58:18

You know, the more corruption you gain, you're going to have a decreased efficacy in PvP

• 58:24

where your skill output damage is going to be slowly reduced.

• 58:28

That's going to be cumulative.

• 58:29

So like even if you PK someone and like lose your corruption, your next PK is going to

• 58:33

acquire additional corruption.

• 58:35

There's going to be a significant guard when it comes to, you know, killing players who

• 58:39

are outside of a certain level range of you.

• 58:41

And that's going to just boost your corruption up.

• 58:44

And you know, there's something there that's I think going to significantly deter open

• 58:48

world PvP.

• 58:50

But the desire is to encourage players who want to participate in PvP to participate

• 58:54

in systems that are focused around PvP.

• 58:56

So castle sieges, you're not going to lose, you know, you're not going to get experience

• 59:00

debt in castle sieges because you opted into that system.

• 59:04

Caravans, you know, as you people move goods throughout the world, they take the risk of

• 59:08

other players finding them and trying to steal their goods to kill their caravans, so to

• 59:13

speak.

• 59:14

You know, very kind of reminiscent of the transporting of goods and like EVE or Archeage,

• 59:20

right?

• 59:21

And additionally, there's like guild wars where guilds can declare war on each other,

• 59:25

you're not going to take experience debt there, you're not going to drop materials and stuff

• 59:28

there.

• 59:29

There's node wars that exist.

• 59:31

There's arena systems.

• 59:32

You know, there's a lot of different kind of opt ins that we want to kind of encourage

• 59:37

players to participate in.

• 59:38

But I mean, the idea there is like, anytime you're engaging in PvP, it should be something

• 59:43

that's meaningful.

• 59:45

Like it should have consequence, it should have a risk versus reward component.

• 59:51

Because you know, like you're describing with Rust, like, when you make those decisions,

• 59:57

it's a little bit more elevated of a adrenaline response.

• 1:00:01

You know what I mean?

• 1:00:02

Like, if you're not going to lose anything.

• 1:00:05

Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:06

Like, those are the types of encounters that like, light you up a little bit.

• 1:00:10

And like, you remember those later on, like, when I think about my time in MMORPGs, I don't

• 1:00:15

think about like the curated things that I did per se, like what the designers intended

• 1:00:20

for me to do.

• 1:00:21

I think about the like player interactions that occurred.

• 1:00:23

Like in ArcheAge I played, I had a literal 23 or 24 hour straight PvP event.

• 1:00:30

There used to be this like Kraken.

• 1:00:33

And we had like ships of our side versus the other side.

• 1:00:35

And our guild kind of, you know, was controlling the first like 70 odd Kraken kills on our

• 1:00:40

server.

• 1:00:41

And we had like these 20 plus ships that we were like boating around with, right.

• 1:00:45

And the whole server like ganged up on us.

• 1:00:47

And we're like coming out to interrupt our ability to kill that Kraken.

• 1:00:51

And the fight lasted almost 24 hours.

• 1:00:53

I actually went to and it was straight.

• 1:00:55

It wasn't just like, all right, let's break.

• 1:00:57

It was like, no, your ship was destroyed.

• 1:00:59

You rebuilt that ship quick and you came back to the fight.

• 1:01:02

Like people would take shifts, they'd go to sleep and come back.

• 1:01:05

It was like something crazy.

• 1:01:07

But it was a lot of fun.

• 1:01:08

And that's like the event I remember most out of that or like in Lineage.

• 1:01:12

We had like a fight outside of Garon in front of that little arena area where it was over,

• 1:01:17

you know, DVC or Antharis's Lair.

• 1:01:20

And like a hunting ground was the best, like the piton pit, I think it was called.

• 1:01:24

And like this, this guild, this alliance, Invincible, they were called, came and like

• 1:01:28

fought with our alliance.

• 1:01:30

And we literally would just respawn and lose level after level fighting for like six hours

• 1:01:36

outside of Garon.

• 1:01:37

Just like those are the types of events that you remember with your friends.

• 1:01:41

And it's because those events had risk associated with them.

• 1:01:44

It's because they had adrenaline.

• 1:01:45

It's because they had, you know,

• 1:01:47

I totally understand.

• 1:01:49

I remember last year, whenever they originally brought out the Rust server for like Twitch,

• 1:01:54

we were on the oil rig for like six hours whenever normally it's supposed to be like

• 1:01:59

a 20 minute thing.

• 1:02:00

And we were right there.

• 1:02:01

And then the final kill landed with a guy that was on top who shot a rocket at me.

• 1:02:07

And I shot him in the head with a sniper while the rocket was coming at me.

• 1:02:12

We killed each other and we rushed back and we collected like 50 sniper rifles.

• 1:02:17

It was one of the coolest and most bad experiences I've ever had.

• 1:02:22

I will never forget that.

• 1:02:24

And I see like the siege that you did and you guys have obviously siege weapons.

• 1:02:29

You have trebuchets.

• 1:02:31

You have all this other crazy stuff, catapults.

• 1:02:33

Wait till we get the golems in.

• 1:02:35

Oh, all right.

• 1:02:36

Yeah.

• 1:02:37

I like you guys.

• 1:02:38

Yeah, no, I was just going to say like you guys, I have like a lot of those moments in

• 1:02:44

video games, like those really hardcore memories.

• 1:02:47

I actually used to play like a lot of Toontown and I have this one memory when we dropped

• 1:02:51

a piano on this cogs head and it was actually one of the best memories that I've ever had

• 1:02:56

in a game.

• 1:02:57

But I do want to ask something about the corruption system.

• 1:03:01

Let's say you have a bunch of people who are just targeting you.

• 1:03:06

Now all of them have different corruption, right?

• 1:03:08

It's because they're different players.

• 1:03:10

They're not necessarily working together.

• 1:03:12

Is there anything like a flag on a player or almost like a kind of like an anti corruption,

• 1:03:19

I don't even know what you would call it, that protects one player from getting grief

• 1:03:22

continuously or does it really just come on the corruption of the player who is doing

• 1:03:29

the action in the first place?

• 1:03:31

So it's so the way that the kind of the flagging system works is there's three states to a

• 1:03:36

player's existence in the flag system.

• 1:03:39

There's combatant where you're engaged in a fight with other combatants or non combatants.

• 1:03:44

There's a non combatant, which means you're not engaged in, you know, taking damage or

• 1:03:48

killing any other combatants or non combatants.

• 1:03:50

And then there's corrupted.

• 1:03:52

Now corrupted players, if a non combatant or a combatant attack a corrupted player,

• 1:03:59

they do not receive the combatant flag.

• 1:04:02

You can basically free kill and attack corrupted players without any detriment, without opening

• 1:04:07

yourself up to attack from other players, like these are essentially criminals, right?

• 1:04:11

And you're attacking those criminals.

• 1:04:14

If you attack other players who are not corrupt, whether they're combatants or non combatants,

• 1:04:19

you're going to flag for PvP, which means like another person can attack you and kill

• 1:04:23

you and everybody's going to go back to being non combatants.

• 1:04:25

Not a problem.

• 1:04:26

Like nobody's going to gain corruption, like you can participate in that PvP.

• 1:04:30

When you flag for PvP, when you become a combatant, you're going to take half the normal death

• 1:04:35

penalties.

• 1:04:37

So it actually we're incentivizing, we're encouraging people to fight back.

• 1:04:40

Like if you want to participate and fight back, that's good.

• 1:04:45

And then the defense mechanism for non combatants who choose not to fight back is that if anybody

• 1:04:49

kills them, they're going to gain that corruption, take four times the normal death penalty,

• 1:04:53

accrue four times the normal debt experience.

• 1:04:55

They're going to have to die in order to remove that corruption.

• 1:04:58

They can lose their gear potentially, they're going to drop four times the normal amount

• 1:05:00

of materials and or and or gatherables.

• 1:05:05

So that's like the defense mechanism for non combatants.

• 1:05:07

Like people traditionally aren't going to do that.

• 1:05:09

Now this is, you know, there's some similarities, I think between other flagging systems that

• 1:05:15

have existed.

• 1:05:16

For example, in Lineage 2, you know, there was a karma system and you really didn't see,

• 1:05:22

I mean, there were players that did, you know, PK and stuff, but you really didn't see it

• 1:05:26

prevalent.

• 1:05:27

You didn't see it happening all the time.

• 1:05:28

We have additional protections as part of the corruption system.

• 1:05:32

So for example, bounty hunters exist, anybody can participate in the bounty hunter system,

• 1:05:36

they can be flagged as a bounty hunter.

• 1:05:38

Bounty hunters will see at all times any corrupt players on the world map.

• 1:05:41

So you can literally hunt them down.

• 1:05:44

And additionally, corrupt players are allowed to fight back against the bounty hunter if

• 1:05:48

they're flagged as a bounty hunter without accruing additional corruption.

• 1:05:51

So it's kind of like a cat and mouse and there's little, there's quest rewards for people who

• 1:05:57

can achieve killing other corrupted players or even killing the bounty hunters.

• 1:06:01

So that'll be kind of fun, I think.

• 1:06:03

But yeah, no, the idea is again, to de-centivize PKing and the corruption system, I think

• 1:06:07

is going to accurately do that.

• 1:06:08

And obviously that gets tested, right?

• 1:06:11

That's something that we need to test.

• 1:06:12

It's something that we need to vet as part of Alpha 2 and as part of the betas and we'll

• 1:06:17

make changes as necessary.

• 1:06:18

But the idea, again, the whole, the concept behind there is disincentivize PKing, encourage

• 1:06:23

people to consensual PVP and to participate in opt-in PVP systems should they choose.

• 1:06:29

But at the same time, again, going back to risk versus reward, if I'm out in the open

• 1:06:33

world and I'm out there and I find a rare spawn of some type of resource and some dude

• 1:06:40

near me is like, oh shit, I want that resource.

• 1:06:42

And they're like running up to grab it and I just finished mining it.

• 1:06:45

And I'm like, nope, later sucker.

• 1:06:47

And I run off, what's their recourse or what's the risk to me?

• 1:06:51

There needs to be some inherent risk present because it creates that adrenaline response.

• 1:06:58

It's like, oh, I'm trying to make it back to town so I can deposit this in my warehouse.

• 1:07:03

Who's going to capture me?

• 1:07:04

Who's going to get me as I'm on my way back?

• 1:07:07

Because we don't have fast travel systems.

• 1:07:10

So when you're traveling, you have to use faster travel such as mounts or flight paths

• 1:07:15

from node to node.

• 1:07:17

Or if a metropolis gets spawned of a scientific type, then you can have teleports between

• 1:07:21

its vassal nodes.

• 1:07:23

You have to develop that stuff.

• 1:07:24

So it's not like I can just yoink the resource and teleport back to town.

• 1:07:28

I'm good to go.

• 1:07:29

You know what I mean?

• 1:07:30

Yeah, I definitely do.

• 1:07:32

And I'm assuming this also works with like naval things as well, because I'm sure there

• 1:07:36

are islands out.

• 1:07:37

And I think that's one of the really interesting things about Ashes of Creation, because I've

• 1:07:42

never really had the opportunity to play a game that really has a fully fleshed out naval

• 1:07:47

system.

• 1:07:48

So what is the scope of like, how big of ships can you build in Ashes of Creation?

• 1:07:52

Like what's the biggest ship you can make?

• 1:07:54

How many?

• 1:07:55

Oh, you can, you can make capital ships, you can make large, very large raid size 40 plus

• 1:07:59

players that can be on a ship.

• 1:08:04

And the intent there is like, you know, ships in and of themselves as like as vehicles,

• 1:08:09

right, they open up an entirely different type of experience than what you would have

• 1:08:13

on land.

• 1:08:15

And it's a completely different tactical engagement when you're, you know, on a ship and you're

• 1:08:20

encountering an adversary, or even for the PvE components of what exists out in the water,

• 1:08:26

you know, I'm, I never really, I don't know if you guys have, but I've never really experienced

• 1:08:30

I felt a game that did like water combat.

• 1:08:34

Well, an MMORPG that did water combat.

• 1:08:36

Well, I always felt like it was awkward, like movement was really awkward for the most part

• 1:08:40

in a lot of the or either was just like, it was like an on screen effect.

• 1:08:44

Sekiro, I think does relatively good water combat and but there's not really a whole

• 1:08:50

lot of change there.

• 1:08:52

It's really just, you can just move faster underwater.

• 1:08:55

But other than that, yeah, there are very few times where water combat doesn't just

• 1:08:59

like the water level isn't the most hated level.

• 1:09:02

Well, yeah, I do feel like in MMOs in particular, some people are saying Guild Wars 2, I played

• 1:09:08

Guild Wars 2, but not enough to actually experience whatever you guys are referring to.

• 1:09:15

But yeah, I feel like water always does feel clunky.

• 1:09:17

Yeah, but people are always excited for it.

• 1:09:19

They're always excited.

• 1:09:20

Like even after wow, put out some water levels that were like less than great.

• 1:09:25

Anytime that they would say that they were doing it again, everybody's like, all right,

• 1:09:27

this is gonna be this is the time it's gonna work.

• 1:09:29

People want right water level or that water level.

• 1:09:32

Yeah.

• 1:09:33

Yeah.

• 1:09:34

And I think the reason why that desires there is because you have this like standard gameplay

• 1:09:38

experience that's on land.

• 1:09:40

And to experience something different just to get you out of that element of, you know,

• 1:09:46

the same loop over and over is I think a welcomed reprieve from like your typical, your typical

• 1:09:54

experiences, right.

• 1:09:55

So the way we kind of approach from a ship perspective of like, how we're going to allow

• 1:09:59

players to construct these different types of ships is there are many different ship

• 1:10:02

classes, right?

• 1:10:03

You have these individual based kind of ship classes that you can construct where you might

• 1:10:07

only fit one or two people on board.

• 1:10:09

They're going to be faster, they're going to have different types of abilities, they're

• 1:10:11

going to have different type of ship components that you can construct and place on the ship.

• 1:10:15

You're going to have group oriented ships where maybe you're going to be able to fit

• 1:10:18

like, you know, eight to 10 people on that ship and they're going to have their own aspects.

• 1:10:22

And then you're going to be able to move up to that multiple groups and eventually raid

• 1:10:26

size ships.

• 1:10:28

Each of these ships have like construction and destruction states that you're going to

• 1:10:32

have to partake in.

• 1:10:34

They're going to have components that you'll be able to construct and place on the ship

• 1:10:37

as well.

• 1:10:38

Are they going to be more offensive?

• 1:10:39

Are they going to be more defensive?

• 1:10:40

Are they going to have utilitarian components to it?

• 1:10:43

Kind of adhering to almost a Trinity and ship design, right?

• 1:10:46

So like something that correlates to your adventuring class in these ships as well.

• 1:10:51

And then you're going to have treasure hunting that you can do out in the ocean.

• 1:10:55

You're going to have treasure maps that you can find and you'll be able to like dig up

• 1:10:59

and find out there.

• 1:11:01

You're going to have like, you know, sea raids, bosses that you'll be able to encounter, which

• 1:11:06

will have, again, a more mechanical component in how it relates to what the ship is doing

• 1:11:11

versus what your adventuring class is doing.

• 1:11:15

And that's, I think, going to be something fun as well.

• 1:11:17

And I think the cool thing about water systems in general, especially when you're talking

• 1:11:23

about an economy driven game that has the movement of goods as an important component

• 1:11:29

of how you utilize the artisanship system, is it creates multiple routes by which you

• 1:11:36

can take these goods, whether through merchant ships or through your caravans transitioning

• 1:11:40

into those merchant ships.

• 1:11:42

And it makes a more dynamic battlefield if other players want to mess with you.

• 1:11:45

Right?

• 1:11:46

Like I think that's something that's cool too.

• 1:11:47

And it provides a different source of threat than what you're accustomed to.

• 1:11:52

Yeah.

• 1:11:53

I think one of the cool things anytime we all get to have a conversation together and

• 1:11:57

one of the reasons it's so fun to talk about video games with Asmin is after you've played,

• 1:12:01

you know, or done 10,000 hours of something, you have a lot of references which you can

• 1:12:06

point back to.

• 1:12:07

Right?

• 1:12:08

So when I'm hearing a lot of these systems, it's like, oh, wow, this does feel like some

• 1:12:12

of the things that I've heard about in Lineage 2 are, oh, wow, I remembered something like

• 1:12:17

this in ArcheAge.

• 1:12:18

And also Eve is another game that I hear in my head a whole bunch.

• 1:12:22

At the very beginning, though, of the episode, we mentioned that it really does feel like

• 1:12:25

a renaissance right now for MMORPGs.

• 1:12:29

The King has been World of Warcraft for a very long time.

• 1:12:31

Now people are trying to look at different experiences, trying to have these new adventures.

• 1:12:35

And not only is Ashes going to be having the alpha this weekend, but there are a bunch

• 1:12:39

of new MMORPGs going on.

• 1:12:41

And as you're going about development, how much attention are you paying to these other

• 1:12:48

games?

• 1:12:49

Because I've always felt like that's one of the most interesting balancing acts of being

• 1:12:52

your own thing that creates a game for the people who love that game.

• 1:12:56

And it's like much more niche.

• 1:12:58

Like when I play old school RuneScape, it's a skilling game.

• 1:13:00

I'm sitting there and I'm going to be leveling up my skills.

• 1:13:03

And that integral progression, that feels good.

• 1:13:06

Whereas WoW is a completely different experience, right?

• 1:13:08

Where it's all about getting the loot or if you're Asmongold, it's all about getting mounts.

• 1:13:11

So how much are you looking at these other games and saying, wow, this is what the current

• 1:13:17

player base wants right now?

• 1:13:19

And how much are you staying in your own lane?

• 1:13:21

Yeah, that's a good question.

• 1:13:24

One of the things, like I said at the beginning, MMORPGs are hard to make.

• 1:13:29

Ours is a particularly ambitious one.

• 1:13:31

I have a lot of experiences across many different MMORPGs that I've played.

• 1:13:36

And I rely on those experiences, obviously, to influence the game design that I have for

• 1:13:45

Ashes of Creation.

• 1:13:47

At the same time, a lot of projects fall into a significant scope creep.

• 1:13:51

Now I feel like our scope is already big enough.

• 1:13:53

So I don't really have to worry too much about the scope creep component of it.

• 1:13:57

But when I look at what other games are doing, I don't really look as much at what the game

• 1:14:03

itself is doing as much as I look at what the reception of the community it's creating

• 1:14:08

that game for and the feedback that that community gives that game.

• 1:14:11

So I love to see when games come out and they debut like, all right, here's our beta, here's

• 1:14:18

our alpha.

• 1:14:19

And I go and I read the boards, I go and I read Reddit, I watch the Twitch channels and

• 1:14:23

read the chat.

• 1:14:24

And I just flood myself with what's the community reception?

• 1:14:30

What's the feedback that communities?

• 1:14:32

Because oftentimes with MMORPGs, you can receive similar feedback across different types of

• 1:14:38

game systems.

• 1:14:39

At the fundamental aspect of what an MMORPG is, whether you portray it through a naval

• 1:14:45

system or you're portraying it through a castle siege system, there's similar desires that

• 1:14:52

the players are looking to experience in order for them to have what's considered fun.

• 1:14:56

And a lot of times MMORPG players are going to share in that sentiment of what fun is.

• 1:15:00

I mean, typically, you'll obviously have some segmentation in the demographic of MMO players.

• 1:15:05

You're going to have tab targeted oriented players, you're going to have action combat

• 1:15:08

oriented players, you're going to have more PvE focused players, you're going to have

• 1:15:12

more PvP focused players, you're going to have crafting and resource gathering, you're

• 1:15:18

going to have farming.

• 1:15:19

I mean, there's different pockets of what players kind of enjoy amongst the MMORPG community.

• 1:15:26

And it's good because in Ashes of Creation, like, yes, we have a lot of ambitious goals

• 1:15:32

from a system standpoint.

• 1:15:34

And we're taking our time because we don't have a publisher breathing down our neck,

• 1:15:40

we don't have an investment, you know, investors breathing down our neck.

• 1:15:45

We get to spend the time it's going to take while keeping the scope dialed into what we've

• 1:15:50

originally focused on.

• 1:15:52

And we get to make sure that that's polished and that it gets developed and that it gets

• 1:15:57

created to kind of our satisfaction and to the players satisfaction.

• 1:16:00

And that's the whole reason why we're doing this.

• 1:16:02

I know I always see players, okay, it's funny, because we announced the project back in 2016.

• 1:16:10

And we went and we had in 2017, we had a Kickstarter.

• 1:16:16

And the purpose of that Kickstarter was to incorporate some additional components that

• 1:16:19

I didn't necessarily have incorporated and kind of get a nice platform from a marketing

• 1:16:24

perspective also of where we can attract an audience because we're a brand new IP, a brand

• 1:16:28

new studio.

• 1:16:29

And, you know, I don't want to necessarily spend money on marketing when it's not time

• 1:16:34

to convert yet, so to speak, right?

• 1:16:35

We're still significantly in development.

• 1:16:38

So you know, the outline of what the game's going to be and kind of approaching the audience

• 1:16:42

does do these things resonate with other MMO players?

• 1:16:46

Or am I like this one off, you know, weird oddity of an MMO player?

• 1:16:51

And it was good to see that like, no, a lot of people want to see this, right?

• 1:16:55

Like right now we have millions of preregistered users and we haven't spent a dime on marketing.

• 1:17:01

And that's a cool thing.

• 1:17:03

Why?

• 1:17:04

Because it's been a grassroots growth, meaning that every month for the past five years,

• 1:17:10

four years, no, four years, every month for the past four years, we have had a development

• 1:17:15

update stream every single month where we spend over an hour, we show the creation of

• 1:17:19

art assets, we show the development of the world, we show the development of these design

• 1:17:23

systems, we, you know, talk about like, okay, here's what we did this month.

• 1:17:27

And I always tell players like, hey, back in 2017, we had a large list of skeptical

• 1:17:31

communities, right?

• 1:17:33

Whatever it was on Reddit, it was on MMORPG.com, whatever.

• 1:17:36

There was a lot of people out there that was says like, oh, this is too good to be true.

• 1:17:40

Like they're never going to do it.

• 1:17:41

Oh, it's a scam.

• 1:17:42

It's a, you know, what does he know about game development?

• 1:17:45

Unreal Engine can't handle that many players.

• 1:17:46

Like there's every single possible criticism that existed for the development of the game

• 1:17:51

was present on some board somewhere.

• 1:17:53

And then as we continue development and we show progress and we show, you know, how this

• 1:17:59

game is coming to life, those voices started to subside, right?

• 1:18:04

And like right now, as we're going into this alpha, you know, we're still going to get

• 1:18:07

a lot of people out there that it's like, oh, you know, there's nothing in this alpha.

• 1:18:10

It's bare bones.

• 1:18:11

There's no content.

• 1:18:12

Well, I mean, that's, that's not the purpose of the alpha.

• 1:18:14

This particular alpha, its purpose is to substantiate what our core systems and architectures

• 1:18:19

are.

• 1:18:20

And you can see over the last, you know, just looking a year back, how different the game

• 1:18:24

looks.

• 1:18:26

You can go on like our YouTube and you can see like a year ago, wow, like there's so

• 1:18:31

much difference in the, in the actual presentation of this game and what's present in just one

• 1:18:36

year's piece of time, like giving it time.

• 1:18:39

The hope is that players are going to look and they're going to see what's possible as

• 1:18:43

we continue moving forward.

• 1:18:45

I mean, we have now over a hundred developers working on the project, not to include, you

• 1:18:49

know, the, the, the teams that we work with that are outsourced as well.

• 1:18:52

And we're growing as you know, as another part of it, we're trying to hire another

• 1:18:56

50 or 60 developers over just the next few months as we get back into our studio.

• 1:19:01

So you know, COVID definitely was, COVID definitely was unfortunate because even from a business

• 1:19:07

standpoint, you know, it was difficult to onboard people remotely.

• 1:19:11

But I thought we did a very good job.

• 1:19:12

I think we onboarded like 30 people over the last, you know, 12, 13 months which was really

• 1:19:19

good.

• 1:19:20

So like part of this, you know, part of the whole process is just letting players sit

• 1:19:24

back and watch and having, giving them the opportunity to give that feedback and to put

• 1:19:29

their voice into it.

• 1:19:30

Because we all have different experiences.

• 1:19:31

We all have different backgrounds.

• 1:19:32

We've all experienced things in different games that we've enjoyed.

• 1:19:35

And, and you know, there's a large, there's a large selection of games out there that

• 1:19:40

do things differently.

• 1:19:41

And it's, and it's good to take player kind of experience into account as you're developing

• 1:19:46

these things.

• 1:19:47

Yeah.

• 1:19:48

And I think a lot of the things that you're alluding to is really these emergent moments

• 1:19:52

that can come from player behavior, the player being an agent of chaos.

• 1:19:56

And that's where the memories really come from.

• 1:19:59

But a thing that I've seen in MMORPGs in particular because of the scope and everything it takes

• 1:20:04

to really keep the ship afloat and to make the money come in.

• 1:20:09

And obviously you've talked about how your game is a lot different because of how it's

• 1:20:13

funded.

• 1:20:14

But sometimes a player base, the emergent behavior ends up going in like a completely

• 1:20:21

unexpected direction, right?

• 1:20:22

Like you make a game that's combat focused and now everybody's ERPing or you make a game

• 1:20:29

that's economy focused and suddenly everybody's ERPing.

• 1:20:33

Suddenly PVP focused and suddenly everybody's ERPing.

• 1:20:36

It happens.

• 1:20:37

It's a lot of ERP in general, but I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:20:39

Well, I went into, for example, when I was doing like testing for New World, for example,

• 1:20:44

I went into that and I was like, I'm going to beat shit up.

• 1:20:46

I'm going to cast magic spells.

• 1:20:49

And by the end of it, I was like, I'm crafting.

• 1:20:51

That is all I'm doing.

• 1:20:53

And I was just sitting in town and I was just crafting.

• 1:20:55

Rich and I have an agreement.

• 1:20:56

I will be the person that goes out and gathers everything.

• 1:20:59

And I'm the one that slays a dragon and Rich is the housewife that just stays home and

• 1:21:04

makes me weapons.

• 1:21:05

Yeah.

• 1:21:06

And it's that arrangement.

• 1:21:07

That's a sweet setup.

• 1:21:08

Yeah, it transcends games.

• 1:21:09

At this point, it's just a living arrangement at this point.

• 1:21:14

But my question for you, Steven, is when you look at the player base, what happens if all

• 1:21:23

of a sudden, all of that emergent behavior, it's all around crafting, for example, and

• 1:21:28

they feel like ashes.

• 1:21:29

Jesus, please get that off the screen, please.

• 1:21:30

Call on us out here.

• 1:21:31

Will there be a marriage?

• 1:21:32

No, I'm just kidding.

• 1:21:33

Okay, so let's say that every single player- There will be marriage and ashes of creation,

• 1:21:38

by the way.

• 1:21:39

I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:21:40

We already, yeah, Asmin and I already agreed.

• 1:21:41

We already know we're getting married.

• 1:21:42

We're just waiting for it to come out.

• 1:21:47

But one of the things is, if you have a player base that all of a sudden, like let's just

• 1:21:51

use crafting as an example.

• 1:21:53

They are obsessed with crafting.

• 1:21:55

Everybody's crafting, saying it's the best crafting game.

• 1:21:58

Do you think that there's a world where some of the other systems slowly start to peel

• 1:22:03

off and you focus on that aspect of the game?

• 1:22:06

Or do you think that the vision of the game is something that will remain the same over

• 1:22:10

time, no matter what emergent player behavior comes out?

• 1:22:13

Because I just feel like the scope is so big.

• 1:22:15

And that's one of the reasons I'm curious.

• 1:22:17

Yeah, I think that one of the ways you balance a game that have many different divergent

• 1:22:24

systems and or progression paths, like Ashes, is that you need to incorporate as many interdependencies

• 1:22:32

as possible between those systems.

• 1:22:35

So that it's a push and pull situation when players spend focus or community spends focus

• 1:22:42

in one direction.

• 1:22:43

Now, with that being said, obviously, the way you kind of try to identify those things

• 1:22:49

as much as possible is through testing.

• 1:22:51

So having as many testing periods as possible, even though we're now just dropping the NDA

• 1:22:57

for alpha, we've been testing in alpha with our almost 15,000 alpha one testers for the

• 1:23:05

past like eight or nine months, I think.

• 1:23:08

Gosh, I might be wrong on that.

• 1:23:10

But like, you will find some of those things, some of those focuses of players.

• 1:23:16

And that's also one of the reasons why you don't always want to have a heavily QA, just

• 1:23:20

like a, you know, hired QA team, because they're not going to have the response, the interest

• 1:23:25

that normal players are going to have all the time.

• 1:23:28

Like we have our own internal QA teams, and our internal QA team is unbelievably amazing.

• 1:23:32

But also at the same time, you want to have that fresh kind of perspective from the players

• 1:23:37

that are participating.

• 1:23:39

So testing a lot is going to identify some of those as you described, you know, areas

• 1:23:45

where players are really going to focus perhaps outside of what we would come to expect.

• 1:23:50

But at the same time, it's like, if the development of these systems is created in such a way

• 1:23:54

that there are interdependencies between these different focuses, is it right for the developers

• 1:24:03

to step in and change things out from under the feet of the players?

• 1:24:07

Like, there's a reason that they're focusing in those areas.

• 1:24:10

Now let's build upon that.

• 1:24:12

You know what I mean?

• 1:24:13

Like, it's not, it's not let's rip out per se.

• 1:24:15

Let's let's the players have given us a direction.

• 1:24:18

Okay, great.

• 1:24:19

Now we know our next update is going to be focused around the activities that the players

• 1:24:24

enjoyed the most.

• 1:24:26

Like that.

• 1:24:27

You don't want to you don't want to shoehorn a population.

• 1:24:29

Okay, you're gonna like this.

• 1:24:31

And if you don't, you better.

• 1:24:32

It's like, if you don't, we're gonna you're gonna put our foot in the sand.

• 1:24:35

And we're gonna tell you that this is how it's gonna be.

• 1:24:38

And you're gonna like it and eat it.

• 1:24:40

Like required by an achievement or something like that.

• 1:24:42

Right.

• 1:24:43

Exactly.

• 1:24:44

Like, no, the players are giving you valuable feedback in that focus.

• 1:24:47

So let's capitalize on it.

• 1:24:48

Yeah, I feel like that's something that we've seen too much in MMORPGs in particular, I

• 1:24:54

feel like you don't see it in other genres as much just because MMORPGs are much more

• 1:25:00

reward focused a lot of the time.

• 1:25:01

I feel like you see like, okay, this is the new system.

• 1:25:05

Because it's the new system, it's going to have a fantastic reward.

• 1:25:08

And whether you like it or not, you have to play.

• 1:25:11

And that's and to be completely frank, that's bullshit.

• 1:25:14

Like I mean, that that's, that's not

• 1:25:18

the way that this is supposed to work.

• 1:25:21

Like developers make, let me tell you something that's been intrinsic across every developer

• 1:25:30

I have hired at Intrepid is their passion is to see the excitement and smile on the

• 1:25:36

player's face they're making a game for.

• 1:25:39

People don't join the gaming industry because they want to make a bunch of money.

• 1:25:44

People join the gaming industry because they take heart in what players are experiencing

• 1:25:51

that they've had a hand in creating.

• 1:25:53

Like that's the ultimate sense of satisfaction.

• 1:25:56

It's the ultimate sense of reward for any developer.

• 1:26:01

So when those decisions get made, again, I'm going to say that it's not the developer's

• 1:26:06

fault.

• 1:26:07

It is the corporate greedy blood sucking overlord that is stepping into the development team

• 1:26:13

and saying you must do this thing.

• 1:26:16

And this thing must be on my desk by the end of this quarter.

• 1:26:19

Like that's that is not I mean, you know, I'm not trying to like put on blast any particular

• 1:26:26

company or whatever.

• 1:26:28

But it's like that's what led me to want to create Intrepid.

• 1:26:32

It's like the developers are like trapped running around, running around like ants in

• 1:26:37

a maze, I would say.

• 1:26:39

And it is, you know, I actually

• 1:26:41

corporate structure is putting up the walls.

• 1:26:43

I think that's pretty much what we're saying.

• 1:26:45

Yeah, look, I went to I went to school for game design.

• 1:26:48

Right.

• 1:26:49

And the thing that you said, Steven, you don't get in game design to to make money.

• 1:26:53

The second that I got out of school and saw how much those game design jobs and like just

• 1:26:57

general jobs around gaming paid, I was like, you know what?

• 1:27:00

I think we're going to turn on stream.

• 1:27:05

Screw this shit.

• 1:27:07

There are a lot of incredibly passionate people that you will meet in in the indie scene.

• 1:27:13

And even if you walk into a triple A, you're still going to meet a lot of those people.

• 1:27:17

And the thing is, though, is just the reality of the job.

• 1:27:21

I actually think one of the worst things about the general the jobs in game design, I feel

• 1:27:27

like the bigger the company, the more likely you are at this point to have very inexperienced

• 1:27:32

people who start out in QA and just slowly work their way up and then all of a sudden

• 1:27:36

they're managing a project that they're really not.

• 1:27:40

They don't have the skill set necessarily to be in charge of.

• 1:27:43

I feel like that's like a term for that, where people voted to appoint competence.

• 1:27:48

Well because they're good at their current job, they get promoted up to the next job

• 1:27:51

until they're not good at the next job, because that's whenever they stop getting promoted.

• 1:27:54

And like, it's definitely an issue.

• 1:27:56

I see that happen with all the principal.

• 1:27:58

Is that what it's called?

• 1:27:59

I'm not sure.

• 1:28:00

Your principal, the peer principal, maybe it is.

• 1:28:02

And like, yeah, I think overall that's definitely been like a struggle with gaming in general,

• 1:28:06

is that like there are so often times where there are changes made to games and things

• 1:28:11

that are added into games that are purely made for, I mean, this is to make money, right?

• 1:28:16

And there's no way that you can explain like, how is this good for players?

• 1:28:20

There's no way that it's good for players.

• 1:28:22

It's just, this is a parasite on the player base.

• 1:28:25

It doesn't help anybody.

• 1:28:26

And it actually like, and I think like the example that you gave with like the cosmetics

• 1:28:30

is definitely true.

• 1:28:31

Many people don't have resentment towards cosmetics whenever the end game rewards are

• 1:28:35

great, but whenever the end game rewards are lacking and the cosmetics are just the end

• 1:28:38

all and be all, it's like, you're either wearing a burlap sack or this giant, like massive

• 1:28:45

plate armor that has flags coming off of it if you spend $20.

• 1:28:48

Yeah, it's just, it's not good.

• 1:28:50

And I think the cannibalism there is what people really resent, not necessarily the

• 1:28:54

store itself.

• 1:28:55

I think that's really at least how I feel about it.

• 1:28:58

Yeah, for sure.

• 1:29:00

No, I think another component, by the way, when we implemented like our cosmetics that

• 1:29:05

are part of the packages is that like, these aren't things you just get on day one either.

• 1:29:10

Like you have to actually earn the end game item first to apply the skin.

• 1:29:15

So it's not like you're purchasing a mount and like, Oh, I have a mount on day one.

• 1:29:21

You know what I mean?

• 1:29:22

It's like, no, you must achieve the comparable mount first and then you get to apply the

• 1:29:27

cosmetic as well.

• 1:29:28

So like, you know, I think that I think what you just said is right.

• 1:29:32

It's like, players have just experienced the bad way of doing cosmetics.

• 1:29:37

And I think there's a good way that's healthy.

• 1:29:42

And again, goes to support the game and at the same time, you know, provides, I think,

• 1:29:48

an option for more for less hardcore players to achieve visual diversity, you know, things

• 1:29:53

that they enjoy.

• 1:29:54

That makes sense.

• 1:29:55

Rich, I want to go ahead and get some questions in there.

• 1:29:59

People have had a ton of questions.

• 1:30:00

I'm already on it.

• 1:30:02

I'm reading.

• 1:30:03

I've got one right here.

• 1:30:04

And this is one from Radovan over on Twitter.

• 1:30:07

He says, please ask if we will have naval combat with destroyable airships.

• 1:30:12

And if we will be able to make nodes on islands in the middle of the ocean or see if there

• 1:30:17

are any.

• 1:30:18

Holy shit, there's a lot of questions there.

• 1:30:22

So you can't just make nodes where you choose.

• 1:30:25

Nodes are predefined locations that exist within the world as they relate to nearby

• 1:30:30

points of interest, right?

• 1:30:31

Because again, they share those points of interest.

• 1:30:33

You won't see the nodes at first.

• 1:30:35

And as you do things, the nodes will then progress and you'll be able to identify, oh,

• 1:30:38

this is a node location.

• 1:30:39

I'm going to do things here.

• 1:30:40

It's going to have quests that loop for me and I can, you know, whatever.

• 1:30:43

There will be some nodes that do exist on islands.

• 1:30:45

So that is a yes, but you won't be placing them.

• 1:30:48

Are there airships that you can fly?

• 1:30:49

No, there's no airships that you can fly around.

• 1:30:53

Will there be, I think the other part of that was like, is there naval battles and destruction?

• 1:30:58

Yes.

• 1:30:59

Yes.

• 1:31:00

Ships are destroyable.

• 1:31:01

One of the, one of the cool things about ship system is that you're not just going to be

• 1:31:05

able to get your ship destroyed and then like float out in the water and rejoin the battle

• 1:31:09

after some like two minutes of repairing and spawn the ship just in the middle of the water.

• 1:31:13

Ships can only be spawned from land locations.

• 1:31:17

So like if you lose a battle at sea, there's a consequence there.

• 1:31:21

You're not just going to have to face that same player.

• 1:31:23

They're going to have to take time to come back out to you, which gives you the time

• 1:31:27

for whatever the reason you destroyed that, you know, get all that person to either get

• 1:31:30

their stuff.

• 1:31:31

Yes.

• 1:31:32

Or to complete the raid or to, you know, travel with the merchandise or, you know, whatever.

• 1:31:38

Yeah.

• 1:31:39

That that's happened.

• 1:31:40

I remember I, in rust, we killed this guy's ship as he was like out at the oil rig and

• 1:31:44

I saw him swimming back by himself in the water.

• 1:31:48

And I, I felt so bad shooting him because he was just going to put him out of his misery.

• 1:31:54

Otherwise he would have swim all the way back.

• 1:31:56

Yeah.

• 1:31:57

Yeah, I did.

• 1:31:58

I had to do it.

• 1:31:59

You did a service.

• 1:32:00

So yeah, that's awesome.

• 1:32:01

I think that for me, like the Naval battles and the stuff, the reason why I think it's

• 1:32:05

like so like really compelling is that like, you know, what is it like only 13% of the

• 1:32:10

ocean has been mapped out.

• 1:32:11

So it's still like an unknown and a lot of ways.

• 1:32:14

Hey, have you seen that UFO shit?

• 1:32:17

Where there's like UFOs flying in and out of the water.

• 1:32:19

Yes.

• 1:32:20

I'm telling you, you need to go rewatch the abyss because there's some fricking under

• 1:32:24

underwater, like alien civilization.

• 1:32:27

That's just watching us.

• 1:32:28

Maybe we're in like a lab experiment.

• 1:32:30

Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:31

No, I've heard about that way too many times for my mom.

• 1:32:35

She's very into that kind of stuff.

• 1:32:36

I'm super into that too.

• 1:32:37

I constantly share video.

• 1:32:39

I share videos with my team, like on Slack all the time.

• 1:32:42

I'm like, look at this one.

• 1:32:43

This is a UFO.

• 1:32:44

And they're just like, yes, Stephen.

• 1:32:45

There's no UFO.

• 1:32:48

It's not a photo glitch.

• 1:32:49

No, to 100% like ancient aliens kind of stuff.

• 1:32:52

I mean, I don't know about the whole ancient aliens thing, but like, I've just it's I don't

• 1:32:59

know.

• 1:33:00

You just like watch these like pilots that are like Navy career pilots and they're like

• 1:33:03

emphatically saying like what we saw is not possible with human technology.

• 1:33:09

Like I tend to listen to what they're saying because they seem credible.

• 1:33:14

But anyway, sorry, going off on alien topics.

• 1:33:17

Oh, expansion, right?

• 1:33:18

Talking about aliens.

• 1:33:19

Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:33:20

Yeah.

• 1:33:21

They're not airships, they're flying saucers.

• 1:33:22

They're spaceships.

• 1:33:23

Yeah.

• 1:33:24

All right, Rich, do you have a question?

• 1:33:25

Yeah.

• 1:33:26

So I know that this is something that you've already spoken about on the show, but I do

• 1:33:32

think it is a good thing to go back to.

• 1:33:34

There are a few questions basically saying, is there any level of nerves going into this

• 1:33:40

Alpha weekend?

• 1:33:41

Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:42

Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:33:43

There are a few incredible nerves.

• 1:33:44

Like I think I was up till 330 last night testing with testers and our discord.

• 1:33:49

And I had to get up at like six this morning because I couldn't sleep.

• 1:33:54

We have like a last minute bug in the build that was like, I'm like, what is this bug?

• 1:33:58

How did it get there?

• 1:33:59

And like, I think we've solved it.

• 1:34:01

Hopefully.

• 1:34:02

I don't know.

• 1:34:03

I had to leave the studio for this, but hopefully everything's not burning down right now.

• 1:34:05

But I'm just kidding.

• 1:34:06

No, yeah, there's a lot of nerve.

• 1:34:08

I think the biggest nerve and probably the biggest help amongst like the community that's

• 1:34:13

watching right now and our Ashes of Creation community is helping to set the right expectation

• 1:34:18

again for the Alpha.

• 1:34:20

Like again, this is our first Alpha.

• 1:34:22

There's not going to be a lot of content.

• 1:34:24

Yeah, what can we do as like players and streamers and also for viewers?

• 1:34:28

Like what can we do to make this Alpha as productive for you guys as possible?

• 1:34:33

I mean, so what we're really looking for out of players is to kind of run through that

• 1:34:37

progression.

• 1:34:38

We want to do a lot of density testing with like sieges.

• 1:34:41

We want to have players kind of move throughout the world to experience the progression systems,

• 1:34:48

to experience kind of, you know, utilizing the launcher, the patcher, connecting into

• 1:34:52

the server, testing what our server architecture feels like, testing what, you know, skill

• 1:34:59

usage is going to be, playing the different types of classes.

• 1:35:02

So like not just sticking with one, but making new characters and kind of running through

• 1:35:05

that, going through the questing systems.

• 1:35:08

You know, those are kind of what our objectives are.

• 1:35:10

We'll be watching everything on the back end.

• 1:35:12

We'll be taking into account this data.

• 1:35:14

You know what I would say from a content perspective and from like a streaming perspective, when

• 1:35:20

you're showing your audiences this, it's super important to remind them that like our process

• 1:35:24

of developing this game is very different than what they might be traditionally used

• 1:35:28

to.

• 1:35:29

When players in the MMORPG genre see or hear the word Alpha, traditionally they're expecting

• 1:35:35

a localization Alpha, which is essentially a Eastern ported MMORPG that's already been

• 1:35:41

launched, that's already been in service.

• 1:35:43

It's a completed game and it's being brought over to North America or to Europe and they've

• 1:35:47

gone through a localization pass and they're saying, Hey, this is Alpha because we would

• 1:35:52

like to sell you this Alpha package and that you get early access to the Alpha package.

• 1:35:57

But in reality, you're buying a completely finished game.

• 1:36:00

So like our approach is completely different.

• 1:36:03

This is still a developmental Alpha.

• 1:36:05

This is not a marketing Alpha.

• 1:36:06

We are in development.

• 1:36:08

There is a lot of change that's going to occur over time to the project that's going to completely

• 1:36:17

redefine the aspect of the game and the visuals of the game and all the content that's going

• 1:36:22

to be incorporated.

• 1:36:23

So making sure audiences know that they're coming into it with the right expectations,

• 1:36:27

that's a super important aspect of this Alpha.

• 1:36:31

You know, there are going to be components that might feel boring, but like that's what

• 1:36:34

we're looking to collect data on is things that players are doing and doing with each

• 1:36:39

other in a dense location.

• 1:36:41

And that's the important part of it.

• 1:36:42

You're a new game.

• 1:36:43

These things happen.

• 1:36:44

Exactly.

• 1:36:45

There you go.

• 1:36:46

Somebody literally said in the chat, somebody said in the chat, they were like, yeah, just

• 1:36:51

throw an OTK logo on it.

• 1:36:53

So you get a free pass when anything's going wrong.

• 1:36:55

I know we have a lot of OTK fans in the studio, developers.

• 1:37:02

They were like, holy shit, you're going on Allcraft.

• 1:37:05

I'm like, yeah, they hit me up last night.

• 1:37:07

I was like, it sounds like a good time.

• 1:37:09

And they're like, oh, I can't believe it.

• 1:37:10

We've got a lot of fans in the studio.

• 1:37:13

Yeah.

• 1:37:14

I also want to say, man, like before we get to the rest of the questions, I want to say

• 1:37:16

thank you so much for coming on, especially on the eve of the game coming out on your

• 1:37:21

birthday.

• 1:37:22

Happy birthday again.

• 1:37:23

Thank you.

• 1:37:24

Thanks.

• 1:37:25

Thank you so much, man.

• 1:37:27

It's really incredible to see how flexible and passionate you are with the project, especially

• 1:37:32

over this past year or so whenever I've been keeping up with it.

• 1:37:35

Thank you, buddy.

• 1:37:36

Appreciate that.

• 1:37:37

No, I mean, again, we do this for the players, and I love any time I have to interact with

• 1:37:42

players.

• 1:37:43

You guys are players.

• 1:37:44

And seeing the audience and their feedback, that's super important to me.

• 1:37:48

So I appreciate the opportunity 100%.

• 1:37:50

And this is a question that I think that we talked about a little bit before, but this

• 1:37:54

is from era from at era to the moon on Twitter.

• 1:37:58

With the MMO genre having become fairly stale over the years, are you looking to innovate

• 1:38:02

the genre or protect its current or sorry, perfect its current tropes?

• 1:38:06

I think we're looking to do a little bit of both.

• 1:38:09

I think on the on the innovation side, like we have a lot of systems that I think are

• 1:38:15

innovative, one of which being the nodes which we've talked a lot about.

• 1:38:18

Yes.

• 1:38:19

Another of which is kind of our monster coin system, which is the ability for players to

• 1:38:23

kind of inhabit the soul of a monster during certain events.

• 1:38:27

So you use the you know, the sponsor coin that you can find in the world, and you become

• 1:38:32

the dragon or you become the troll or you become one of the zombies in the horde.

• 1:38:36

And as you kind of move with the event against a node, you can attack NPCs and you can attack

• 1:38:42

other players.

• 1:38:43

You can disable like buildings by attacking and damaging the buildings.

• 1:38:47

These are part of like our event systems.

• 1:38:49

I think that's a cool, innovative thing that, you know, I think some games have done those

• 1:38:52

in the past, but I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

• 1:38:55

No, I think I think there's a lot of stuff we're looking to to innovate on.

• 1:38:59

But at the same time, like I said, like you don't have to reinvent the wheel for MMORPG

• 1:39:04

gamers to be content and happy.

• 1:39:06

Like they're looking for content at the end of the day.

• 1:39:08

They're looking for social interaction at the end of the day.

• 1:39:11

A new game brings both of those things.

• 1:39:15

And I think as long as they're familiar with the core systems being level progression,

• 1:39:20

adventuring class, kind of crafting, you know, general hunting and AI experiences, like those

• 1:39:25

are those are where your wheelhouse are.

• 1:39:27

And then you can put whatever spokes you want on that wheel to innovate.

• 1:39:32

This one's coming from Kovyati on Twitter.

• 1:39:35

It says, will the augmentation system create distinct classes?

• 1:39:39

My biggest fear is that we have these 64 super exciting class names, but in the end, a lot

• 1:39:45

of them might feel the same.

• 1:39:47

And are there going to be different resource management or anything like that is the question.

• 1:39:53

So the kind of way excuse me.

• 1:39:58

The kind of way that augments work in the class system is there are eight archetypes

• 1:40:03

that exist, right?

• 1:40:04

You have fighter, you have tank, you have rogue, you have ranger, you have summoner,

• 1:40:09

you have mage, you have cleric, and you have bard.

• 1:40:13

Those are the eight archetypes.

• 1:40:14

And then as you're leveling those up, you're going to select your active skills from those

• 1:40:18

archetypes.

• 1:40:19

And the active skill selection is not going to change like that's your active skills are

• 1:40:21

going to come from that archetype.

• 1:40:23

When you select your secondary archetype to create your class, that secondary archetype

• 1:40:28

is going to provide you with four schools of augmentation.

• 1:40:32

And those schools can be applied to your active skills.

• 1:40:35

So for example, in the past, we've kind of described like, one of those ideas is like

• 1:40:38

if I select fighter as my primary, and I have this kind of charge ability that zooms me

• 1:40:45

across the battlefield and deal some damage on X target, that's my primary ability.

• 1:40:53

If I select mage as a secondary, and I choose the teleportation school to apply to the charge,

• 1:40:58

now instead of spending whatever time it takes to reach your target, you'll instantly teleport

• 1:41:02

to the target, right?

• 1:41:03

Or if I apply the elemental school from the mage secondary to the charge, instead of dealing

• 1:41:09

X damage upon contact, I might now deal X damage with some elemental dot like a fire,

• 1:41:15

they catch fire or some electrical damage that might stun the target.

• 1:41:20

Those are kind of how we create differences across and the whole idea behind the augmentation

• 1:41:27

of active abilities is that we're adhering to a traditional Trinity system.

• 1:41:35

And the one of the ways we want to flirt with that Trinity system is to allow their traditional

• 1:41:40

role of an archetype to move in one of the directions by applying those augmentation

• 1:41:44

schools of their secondary choice.

• 1:41:47

And I think that gives a lot of flexibility, right?

• 1:41:49

Now you're kind of playing a little bit with what your role is.

• 1:41:53

Is that going to create metas?

• 1:41:54

You know, obviously, I think from a balance perspective, it's a little bit difficult to

• 1:41:58

achieve not having metas per se.

• 1:42:02

But what it will do likely is because of the Trinity based system, you're going to have

• 1:42:06

different schools of metas.

• 1:42:08

And those schools of metas will now have kind of a counterplay system, where it's a rock

• 1:42:13

paper scissors, like what, you know, what beats out others.

• 1:42:15

And we're not focusing on like one v one balancing, we're focusing on party versus party.

• 1:42:20

And I think that's something that that is going to help as well.

• 1:42:23

Yeah, it actually funny enough, it reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy 11.

• 1:42:28

In some ways where you really had like that's I think it was called a side job or second

• 1:42:32

job.

• 1:42:33

And it's like if you were a healer and a dragoon, then all of a sudden your your dragon was

• 1:42:37

like healing and different things like that.

• 1:42:39

But it reminds me of quite a few different systems.

• 1:42:42

Very exciting.

• 1:42:43

All in all, Asmin, there's one question that everybody's been asking in your chat.

• 1:42:46

Do you want to do you want to ask it?

• 1:42:49

You can go ahead and ask him.

• 1:42:52

I'm excited now.

• 1:42:55

Is there going to be in character customization?

• 1:43:00

Is there going to be a plethora of sliders for?

• 1:43:10

How expansive is the character customization in Ashes of Creation?

• 1:43:14

Expense.

• 1:43:15

Okay, I think I know now what you're talking about.

• 1:43:19

So on the character creation side, you know, our desire probably come, I would say, around

• 1:43:27

the beta one phase is going to be a pretty robust character creator.

• 1:43:31

I really love you know, if I can give props to to BDO's character creator, they did it,

• 1:43:36

I thought a really great job.

• 1:43:39

And you know, when I think about kind of, you know, how we want to approach customization

• 1:43:43

from a character standpoint, we want to provide a lot of tools.

• 1:43:48

And that's going to be focused on not just like facial customization, and hair customization,

• 1:43:54

but body customization as well, including, you know, the torso region.

• 1:44:00

And there's stuff along the robust, right?

• 1:44:03

I think that's important.

• 1:44:04

One of the cool things ideas that we have for character creator is when the character

• 1:44:07

creator is ready, we would love to offer that early to to players so that they can play

• 1:44:12

around creating characters, you do little like character creator contests, and then

• 1:44:16

save the character creator as well so that they can have their preset character ready

• 1:44:21

to go on launch day.

• 1:44:22

Because one of the things I couldn't stand as a player when launch day would come for

• 1:44:26

a new MMORPG is having to decide between either spending the time I want to spend in the character

• 1:44:31

creator making my character the way I want it to, or rushing to get into the server.

• 1:44:35

So I get ahead of the curve.

• 1:44:37

And I think if you provide that to players early, it's super, it's super good.

• 1:44:41

So that they can save that.

• 1:44:42

And it was great.

• 1:44:43

It was a perfect solution.

• 1:44:45

If you could reserve your character, make it early, then everybody could log on.

• 1:44:49

Absolutely.

• 1:44:50

I mean, you only had five different hairstyles.

• 1:44:52

So even that took extra time.

• 1:44:54

Yeah, the character creator you'll see in this alpha, obviously, super bare bones, you

• 1:44:58

know, you're only gonna have presets available.

• 1:45:00

And, you know, there's only four of our nine races that are available.

• 1:45:04

There's only three of the primary archetypes that are going to be available.

• 1:45:08

Like I said, from a content perspective, it's very bare bones.

• 1:45:11

This is going to be kind of just exploring the world, it's going to be experiencing those

• 1:45:15

three archetypes, it's going to be killing some monsters, doing some questing, and then

• 1:45:19

participating in, you know, node development and gear acquisition, primarily.

• 1:45:25

All right, well, that's great.

• 1:45:28

I mean, honestly, I've been very excited.

• 1:45:31

It's still kind of weird, because we had the conversation last year, and the game was very

• 1:45:36

far out.

• 1:45:37

And you know, there are all these ideas and everything.

• 1:45:39

And here we are on the eve, tomorrow, it begins.

• 1:45:42

Tomorrow, the first time, people are actually going to be able to see what this game looks

• 1:45:46

like with no NDA or anything.

• 1:45:49

And are you a bit nervous?

• 1:45:51

Yeah, I'm super nervous.

• 1:45:53

One of the things I've tried to tell people is that like, if you are coming into this

• 1:45:56

alpha expecting to play a game, your expectations are off.

• 1:46:01

Like this is not going to be a traditional experience of playing a game.

• 1:46:05

You are participating as a tester.

• 1:46:06

I included a little login screen that I would love for content creators to like kind of

• 1:46:12

read to their audiences before they even start.

• 1:46:15

Because it kind of focuses on like expectations on systems we're testing, and just letting

• 1:46:20

audiences know it's like, hey, this is something that you get to look forward to and be a part

• 1:46:25

of the process.

• 1:46:26

If you choose to, like if you choose to watch and if you choose to, you know, join discord

• 1:46:31

or forums or Reddit or whatever, and comment on like your history and your experiences

• 1:46:37

and like watch the stuff and give feedback, that's what we're looking for.

• 1:46:42

Because that's what's important to us and how we can cater the development around kind

• 1:46:47

of the expectations of the players.

• 1:46:49

Well that is pretty much exactly what I think a lot of us would love to hear.

• 1:46:54

And I can probably speak for a lot of people whenever I say I am so excited to see what

• 1:46:59

it's going to be like take the first steps into it and really have that experience.

• 1:47:03

So Steven, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:47:06

Thank you for putting so much of your own personal time and money and just effort into

• 1:47:10

the game.

• 1:47:11

I think that the MMO genre is going to be better because of it.

• 1:47:14

Honestly, I'm really excited to play.

• 1:47:16

And again, thanks for coming on on your birthday on the day, the day right before the day right

• 1:47:23

before the game comes out.

• 1:47:25

And I am just so excited.

• 1:47:27

So happy to play.

• 1:47:28

So thank you so much.

• 1:47:29

Absolutely.

• 1:47:30

Thank you guys for having me.

• 1:47:31

I'm excited to share it with your audience and have you guys share with your audience

• 1:47:34

and have you guys there to give us feedback.

• 1:47:36

It means a lot to us as a development team to see the interest from the community to

• 1:47:42

experience that kind of excitement and that jubilee that occurs when you see something

• 1:47:46

new and shiny and you get to participate in that process.

• 1:47:50

And that's something that means a lot to us.

• 1:47:52

So I appreciate you guys letting me come on and chat about it.

• 1:47:55

Well, so do we.

• 1:47:57

We definitely do.

• 1:47:58

Thank you so much, man.

• 1:48:00

And as always, guys, we are going to be moving over to the after show in just a few minutes

• 1:48:04

here.

• 1:48:05

It's going to be on Rich's show.

• 1:48:06

We're going to take questions, call ins from you guys and just kind of talk about different

• 1:48:09

stuff, get into everything and just kind of have that more personal interaction for you

• 1:48:13

guys that want to hang out and just stick around for that.

• 1:48:15

You guys can just wait around here or just go over to Rich's channel whenever he goes

• 1:48:18

live.

• 1:48:19

But other than that, that's pretty much about it.

• 1:48:22

And so if they want to find out any more information about Ashes of Creation, it's just Ashes of

• 1:48:25

Creation dot com, isn't it?

• 1:48:27

Yeah.

• 1:48:28

Ashes of Creation dot com.

• 1:48:29

You can find us at Ashes of Creation on all social medias.

• 1:48:32

And feel free to join our Discord at Ashes of Creation as well.

• 1:48:34

We have a lot of conversation topics there and have a lot of fun.

• 1:48:39

There we go.

• 1:48:40

All right.

• 1:48:41

Mods can link some of that stuff as well.

• 1:48:42

And thank you guys again all so much for watching today.

• 1:48:44

It's been a great episode.

• 1:48:46

Thank you guys so much.

• 1:48:47

And as I said earlier, because the alpha is coming out tomorrow, Steven is making me work

• 1:48:52

on a Friday.

• 1:48:54

Usually Fridays are my off days, but however, we are going to make an exception.

• 1:48:57

I will be back online tomorrow morning, early, just like always, to play Ashes of Creation.

• 1:49:03

Also, my 24 hour stream is canceled.

• 1:49:10

I talked to Rich.

• 1:49:12

I convinced him to play Ashes of Creation with me tomorrow.

• 1:49:15

Oh, good.

• 1:49:16

Hang out.

• 1:49:17

Yeah, he's going to be chilling.

• 1:49:18

We're going to be playing together, doing everything that we have to do.

• 1:49:20

Rich has been addicted to cat girls, but I think that we can get him off it for just

• 1:49:23

a couple of days.

• 1:49:24

Yes.

• 1:49:25

I will take a brief break from the cat girls, but I will be coming back to the cat girls

• 1:49:30

until the full release of Ashes of Creation.

• 1:49:33

So thank you again, Steven.

• 1:49:35

I'm very excited to try everything out tomorrow.

• 1:49:39

And once again, happy birthday.

• 1:49:40

We hope to have you on the show again sometime soon.

• 1:49:42

Thanks, guys.

• 1:49:43

I appreciate it.

• 1:49:44

I'd love to join you guys again.

• 1:49:45

Absolutely.

• 1:49:46

Thanks all for coming on.

• 1:49:47

I'll see you later.

• 1:49:48

Peace, guys.

• 1:49:49

Bye.