Talk:2022-12-23 Livestream

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Intro

• 00:00

Welcome and salutations to you all for our glorious development update for December.

• 00:16

We're coming to you live from our studio.

• 00:19

Obviously, I'm here today with some new faces.

• 00:24

Well, not really.

• 00:25

You've seen Langford here before.

• 00:27

We had him on during, actually it was your anniversary.

• 00:29

It was.

• 00:30

It was in February of this last year.

• 00:33

He's our executive producer and of course with me as always, Steven Tariff, our one

• 00:37

and only creative director.

• 00:38

Hello.

• 00:39

And I'm Margaret Brown, your Community Marketing Lead.

• 00:44

This is different.

• 00:45

It's different, right?

• 00:46

Actually, when was the last time that we did a stream in person?

• 00:50

It was in our old office.

• 00:52

Yeah, that was like almost two years ago or something.

• 00:54

A little over actually.

• 00:56

It's crazy to see how much we've grown as a company and I mean, this is the perfect

• 01:00

segue of what this stream is about too, is that you've just-

• 01:06

It's been a crazy year of growth.

• 01:08

Not even just a year.

• 01:09

During the pandemic, we grew an immense amount.

• 01:11

Yeah, but this year especially though has been pretty considerable as well.

• 01:16

We talked a lot about showing up at the studio and giving people a peek inside.

• 01:21

You guys saw some old, those of you who've been following since like circa 2018, 2019,

• 01:26

you saw- Steven walking around with his phone.

• 01:27

With my phone kind of doing, and now this is a little bit different, higher production

• 01:32

quality, but of course- We're still keeping the casual vibes.

• 01:35

Yeah, and the whole spirit of this is to invite you guys in, let you take a look under the

• 01:39

hood, meet some of the developers, and actually it's been pretty fun to do some of these interviews.

• 01:44

Yeah, Steven's already done one earlier, so we're-

• 01:47

Yeah.

• 01:48

These are a little pre-recorded obviously so that we can make it before, but we're trying

• 01:50

not to cut as- We didn't cut as much as possible.

• 01:54

Right.

• 01:55

So we're very much just trying to have pre-flowing conversations, which is really fun.

• 01:58

And I think these types of things are really good actually because obviously we do our

• 02:02

monthly updates.

• 02:03

Yeah.

• 02:04

But not everybody has an opportunity to kind of watch each month what's happening and what

• 02:08

those updates are, and this is a great way at the end of the year to kind of concisely

• 02:12

bring in what's happened and give people a one segment kind of look at all that's transpired

• 02:18

over the last 12 months.

• 02:19

Yeah.

• 02:20

So when you get a little glimpse into areas in our studio, so you can kind of see that,

• 02:25

and once we do have all of our cool murals up and our art, we will definitely do a proper

• 02:29

studio tour.

• 02:30

We just want to make sure that, we'll kind of give you a glimpse early on, and I know

• 02:34

those of you who are Kickstarters, who you're going to get a real life tour-

• 02:38

Ooh, that's right.

• 02:39

In person, yeah.

• 02:40

That, we want to make sure that it's really fun for you all, so that's probably going

• 02:42

to be nearer to closer for a long time.

• 02:45

Yeah, for sure.

• 02:46

Right.

• 02:47

So that's the business of this year, but honestly on the production side, you know-

• 02:52

Holy cow.

• 02:53

Your team has grown immensely.

• 02:54

Well, it did.

• 02:55

That's very true.

• 02:56

Yeah.

• 02:57

It doubled in size.

• 02:58

It did.

• 02:59

It did.

• 03:00

It doubled in size, and it's like super duper cool to have all these people like actually

• 03:02

supporting the team.

• 03:03

You know, like we talked about this a long time ago when we were moving from like a small

• 03:06

company to like a bigger company, and we were like, we're going to need a lot of support,

• 03:10

and we're kind of there now.

• 03:11

I mean, we've still got a long ways to go with a lot of growth still to come, but it's

• 03:15

super exciting.

• 03:16

I think it's been really cool to kind of watch quarter after quarter this year as we're doing

• 03:20

the production strategy meetings and going over the milestone schedules, just seeing,

• 03:24

oh, new face, new face, new face, new face, you know, keeps on going.

• 03:28

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

• 03:29

And we talked about annual reviews last month, how we were moving into wrapping those up,

• 03:35

and you guys have like way more people that you have to do reviews for.

• 03:37

Oh my gosh.

• 03:38

For me, my team is a little smaller, but you know, we also are supporting the development

• 03:42

team in order, like we're different people.

• 03:44

Like the people who are talking to you on, you know, like Twitter and hanging out with

• 03:49

you on Discord, we're a whole other team.

• 03:52

So when we get comments that are like, why are you talking to me and not developing the

• 03:57

game?

• 03:58

These guys are hardcore working super every day, really hard and passionately, as you're

• 04:03

going to see when you meet some of the developers.

• 04:05

Oh, and our leads team has grown too.

• 04:07

Oh, it's significantly, yeah.

• 04:08

We did some leadership training too.

• 04:10

Yeah, we did.

• 04:11

That was fun.

• 04:12

It was incredible.

• 04:13

We had a few, I think we did like almost six days between the two different groups of those

• 04:18

leadership meetings.

• 04:20

And they were a lot of fun just being holed up in a room for like 10 straight hours each

• 04:25

day.

• 04:26

Well, it made us realize like where we're lacking things, where we need to work towards

• 04:30

and things of that sort.

• 04:31

And sometimes you need that reflection.

• 04:33

And for people who haven't been leaders and leadership roles before, it also helps you

• 04:38

realize like how to talk to people or how to-

• 04:40

But you know, my most important takeaway I think from those particular leadership meetings

• 04:44

this year was just the level of alignment that existed already between us and the leads

• 04:50

and the development.

• 04:51

It was so cool.

• 04:52

She said to us that like the biggest problem that most other companies have is the camaraderie

• 04:56

and like sharing the same vision.

• 04:58

And she's like, that's the one thing you guys don't like have a problem with.

• 05:01

That was the thing.

• 05:02

It was so cool to see her come in and then go like, wow, you guys already got this.

• 05:05

Like this is crazy.

• 05:06

Like how connected you guys already are.

• 05:08

I do tons of these.

• 05:10

And then she went off on some of the ones that she's done and it was like, oh my gosh,

• 05:15

you guys are gelling so much better than all those other places.

• 05:18

My favorite thing about that whole process actually was as we were going through each

• 05:21

categories and we were filling out like scaling one through 10 numerical values of like those

• 05:27

particular things.

• 05:28

And we put all of our stickies up on each of the categories like, whoa, these are all

• 05:32

really close to each other.

• 05:33

That's so true.

• 05:34

Because that means we all see where our problems are and we're all on the same page.

• 05:38

Absolutely.

• 05:39

Which was really, I would agree with you.

• 05:40

That's pretty neat.

• 05:41

It was really good.

• 05:42

You know, it's really cool though.

• 05:43

The whole point of this last month of the year is that we get to kind of look back on

• 05:47

everything that we've accomplished, on all the things that we have plans for the future

• 05:51

and just reflect on kind of the course of the studio over the last year.

• 05:55

Yeah.

• 05:56

It's really a great opportunity for us to kind of get that back looking perspective.

• 06:01

Absolutely.

• 06:02

Yeah.

• 06:03

On our front, like my teams are looking at like the data from social media, what things

• 06:06

went well, what things didn't.

• 06:08

How can we engage with you all in a better way?

• 06:10

And obviously you've seen us continually progressing over that over the years.

• 06:14

I mean, even the way we do our live streams has changed and like next year we plan to

• 06:18

make more changes.

• 06:19

So we're definitely keeping an eye out on like the things that you guys say to us, how

• 06:23

you interact with us.

• 06:25

And obviously on the development front, continually progressing and making sure that we are just

• 06:29

being more efficient with our production.

• 06:30

Yeah.

• 06:31

And of course, you know, we're all watching kind of coverage for the game from our awesome

• 06:36

content creators out there who constantly kind of, you know, review what the live stream

• 06:42

updates are and everything for the game for our audience.

• 06:46

And I think one thing that can be said that all of you are going to agree with, 2022 was

• 06:52

a very different pace of year for our updates.

• 06:55

They'll get blanked.

• 06:56

I know.

• 06:57

But you guys got to see each month, you know, significant progress.

• 07:04

And of course that comes in part due to the company scaling over this last year, which

• 07:08

was very significant.

• 07:09

But in addition, just kind of as development continues, these things will ramp almost in

• 07:16

a very vertical way, right?

• 07:20

And that's something that I think people get to look forward to for 2023.

• 07:23

Of course.

• 07:24

And I think, you know, a lot of times you see games that are developed and you get to

• 07:28

see it like right when it's beta is, which their beta is like pretty much their games

• 07:31

ready to launch and they're just testing and polishing for us.

• 07:34

Like you're getting to follow us on this journey and making an MMO is a big feat.

• 07:39

It is much bigger than people think.

• 07:41

And I hope that you are getting a glimpse into like all the little details and the new

• 07:44

details that we, yeah, what it takes.

• 07:46

Cause it's a lot more effort than sometimes I think people think.

• 07:49

Right.

• 07:50

And I know that's not for everybody.

• 07:51

And that's why we always say like we make different pieces of content for different

• 07:54

types of folks.

• 07:55

Absolutely.

• 07:56

I mean this phase that we're in from a development perspective is really catered towards those

• 08:00

individuals in the community who are interested in watching the development of a game.

• 08:04

Because like you're saying, this is not just something that many players experience, but

• 08:08

also development teams don't typically think about how they're actively working on features

• 08:13

and assets that get shared live, you know, essentially.

• 08:19

I cannot think of another company that has invested this much in their community this

• 08:22

far in advance of the product.

• 08:24

Like we've been bringing this, you know, going this, going on this for three, four,

• 08:28

five years now building this community and it's amazing.

• 08:31

Yeah.

• 08:32

So amazing.

• 08:33

I was actually in a, you know, obviously if you watch our streams live, you get to see

• 08:35

all the amazing fan art that people send us.

• 08:37

And I was talking to Zach, who you're going to see in an interview following this segment.

• 08:43

And I was actually saying how crazy it is that we have all this amazing fan art.

• 08:47

And one of the walls in our hallway actually like right near us over there is where we're

• 08:51

planning to do this huge cork bar where we're going to put all the fan art.

• 08:55

So keep sending us those things.

• 08:56

We love seeing them.

• 08:58

And we've already had people making cosplay and we're definitely going to put that up

• 09:01

there.

• 09:02

So we appreciate you all so much.

• 09:04

And we hope that, you know, this to kind of segue into what you're going to be able to

• 09:07

see for the rest of today is that, you know, you're going to get a glimpse into our studio.

• 09:11

We want to set expectations that, you know, we haven't quite decorated everything yet

• 09:15

in Trepid style.

• 09:16

We are planning to do that.

• 09:17

We have some cool murals.

• 09:18

I chatted with John about like what pieces we're going to do and stuff.

• 09:21

So once those things get put up and we have a little bit more of a, you know, a vibe that

• 09:25

we want to share with you, we'll definitely give you a proper tour.

• 09:28

And we also bought some equipment, like gimbals and stuff like that.

• 09:33

You've been seeing our production quality for Extra Life increasing and obviously this.

• 09:37

So we do have plans of showing you guys those things.

• 09:40

But you know, this is going to be an opportunity for you to kind of get cozy with the developers,

• 09:45

get to know them a little bit more, not just about what the work that they work on, but

• 09:49

like them as people and kind of what they like about games.

• 09:52

And so we'll be chatting with the folks who helped with the Unreal Engine update, character

• 09:56

creator, seasons and environments, combat, gathering, and of course crafting.

• 10:01

So we hope that you enjoy that.

• 10:03

And of course we're going to look back at the year and kind of do a little year in review.

• 10:07

Bring your tissues, get ready to cry.

• 10:09

Shout out to Mike Becchio, who also made this tree.

• 10:13

Oh, I love the tree.

• 10:14

Oh my gosh.

• 10:15

The attention to detail on the little ornaments.

• 10:18

This little guy's face for the ornament is so cool.

• 10:21

Yeah, and he even made you one with him.

• 10:23

I know.

• 10:24

I love that.

• 10:25

We showed that last month.

• 10:26

This guy, the little Vec down here.

• 10:28

Yes.

• 10:29

Oh, it looks so cool.

• 10:30

They're really, really cute.

• 10:32

Maybe someday we'll have ornaments that we sell for a holiday.

• 10:35

I know.

• 10:36

That'd be great.

• 10:37

Should totally do that.

• 10:38

Yeah.

• 10:39

So before we go into everything, I do want to spotlight our comment for YouTube.

• 10:42

And of course, if you want to be spotlighted, be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube on our

• 10:47

development update and also leave a comment and you could possibly be this spotlight.

• 10:53

So today's spotlight is Eric634, and they wanted to know, I'm very curious what work

• 10:59

Intrepid is doing to capture valuable data in Alpha 2.

• 11:03

Has Intrepid built dashboards and data gathering tools?

• 11:06

And I feel like this is a great- Oh man, I was going to say, who gets this

• 11:09

one?

• 11:10

Yes.

• 11:11

I feel like we're all hyped about that.

• 11:12

Yes, of course.

• 11:13

Data.

• 11:14

Yes, well, we do.

• 11:15

We love data.

• 11:16

But here is actual work going into data and collecting and game logs and stuff that we'll

• 11:22

be using down the road a lot, especially during our Alpha to help us, to guide us to understand

• 11:28

where we're meeting our marks and beating our marks and what we want to be accomplishing

• 11:32

as far as where finding the fun is.

• 11:34

Right.

• 11:35

Yeah.

• 11:36

And of course, those come along with a complimentary set of tools that are created by our developers

• 11:40

to collect that data, not just from gameplay, because that's one important aspect of it,

• 11:45

what players are doing in the game.

• 11:47

But another part of it which completes that picture is active community engagement with

• 11:53

those players as well to tell the tale from the player's perspective, not just the actions

• 11:57

in game.

• 11:58

Right.

• 11:59

And I feel like a lot of companies and many of us probably in the community have experienced

• 12:02

this in other games, decisions get made from just data points that are numerical, right?

• 12:07

It has to be a combination.

• 12:08

But it must be a full picture that requires some investment on the company's behalf of

• 12:13

that community outreach and engagement, right?

• 12:15

Yeah.

• 12:16

And that's what I mean.

• 12:17

That's one of the reasons why I started working here is the first conversation Steven and

• 12:20

I had on the phone.

• 12:21

At Milton's, we ate lunch at Milton's.

• 12:22

Before that, I had a conversation with you on the phone because McPee was like, you need

• 12:27

to come work with us.

• 12:28

And I was like, I don't know.

• 12:29

And chatting with Steven really like, and I think back on it, that was like four years

• 12:33

ago for me.

• 12:35

But the reason why I was like, this is a place where I want to go is because you really understand

• 12:40

community.

• 12:41

You understand how important it is that we are gamers also and that we are making games

• 12:46

for gamers.

• 12:47

And I often work in the past with people who maybe aren't gamers and they didn't really

• 12:52

get the perspective of that.

• 12:53

Or we'd be making decisions because it's like, hey, this is the bottom line and we're trying

• 12:57

to hit that.

• 12:58

And if you don't hit this, you're fired.

• 12:59

And there's nothing more frustrating from a player's perspective when something changes

• 13:03

in the game and it changes for the wrong reason because some value in some cell in some Excel

• 13:08

sheet says, hey, this is the data that we scrapped from player activity.

• 13:12

Yeah.

• 13:13

And so what we're doing when we're sending reports over, we're like, hey, the numbers

• 13:16

are down for this because X and Y.

• 13:18

We give some analyzation to it.

• 13:19

And I think that sometimes that part is not read or looked into as much as it should be.

• 13:24

And it's so important to not just like look at data and make decisions, but also understand

• 13:28

like why that data is that way in the like in the grand scheme of things.

• 13:33

And with that, I think that we're going to head on over and meet up with our Unreal Engine

• 13:38

and character creator folks who Steven was interviewing.

• 13:40

So we hope that you enjoy the rest of the stream and we will see you all on the flipside.

• 13:44

I love the fireside feel to this.

• 13:46

I just got to say it.

• 13:47

It's so good.

• 13:48

We aren't going to stop that.

• 13:49

We definitely want the genuine vibe.

• 13:51

And I think hopefully you guys all feel that way through this.

• 13:54

You know, all of our streams have been that way.

• 13:56

We want even just these types of ones to feel that way too.

• 13:58

Yes.

• 13:59

We'll see you guys in a little bit.

Meet a few of our Engineers

• 14:09

Hey, guys, I am joined by three of our awesome developers.

• 14:14

We have some of our engineers here at the studio.

• 14:16

Why don't we take a second for you guys to introduce yourself?

• 14:18

Hello, I'm Clayton.

• 14:20

You might remember me from the character creator live stream.

• 14:23

Hi, I'm Mitch.

• 14:25

I've been here at Intrepid for coming up on four years now and I'm a senior engineer.

• 14:30

I'm Zach.

• 14:31

You might also recognize me from the character creator live stream.

• 14:34

And me and Zach are also engineers.

• 14:36

Yeah, we are also also gameplay engineers.

• 14:39

So that was a fun live stream.

• 14:42

But let's talk a little bit about earlier in the year.

• 14:45

Actually, it was at the end of 2021 and into January of 2022.

• 14:51

We showcased our transition over to Unreal Engine 5.

• 14:56

That was quite an endeavor.

• 14:57

Yeah.

• 14:58

We had a lot of things going on all at once.

• 15:01

Yeah, it was a lot going on.

• 15:03

There were a lot of people who participated in kind of getting the project over to Unreal

• 15:07

5.

• 15:08

Talk to me a little bit about what that process entailed.

• 15:10

Yeah, Mitch and I were at the forefront of that, especially Mitch.

• 15:15

I was helping out a lot with the version control.

• 15:18

We have a lot of additions to our custom version of Unreal Engine that allow our designers

• 15:24

to do what they need to do and allow custom features for our engineers.

• 15:28

And getting those reconciled with all of the awesome new features from Unreal Engine 5

• 15:32

was a lot of work.

• 15:33

So, right.

• 15:34

Yeah, the more custom changes that occur in the engine makes that process a bit longer

• 15:39

and a bit more intricate.

• 15:40

Right.

• 15:41

Right.

• 15:42

And when we get a new version, we have to make sure that all of the previous edits we'd

• 15:46

made to Unreal Engine still apply or still are needed.

• 15:51

So we had to step through, pardon me, basically everything we had done up to that point and

• 15:58

one by one say, do we need this?

• 16:00

Do we need something else?

• 16:02

And talk to us a little bit about kind of what benefits, I know the audience obviously

• 16:07

has had an opportunity over this course of this last year to see the benefits that Unreal

• 16:10

5 bring to the project from a visual fidelity standpoint, but also a little bit behind the

• 16:16

curtain on the tech side.

• 16:17

What type of benefits come from Unreal Engine 5?

• 16:19

Well, there's a lot finer control for one, for the map and for things like separating

• 16:26

out things into, they call it world partition, to greatly increase the performance of especially

• 16:34

the client in very cluttered areas.

• 16:37

Right.

• 16:38

The large scale additions to the engine have really helped us from the regards that we

• 16:42

were already going to have this massive world and the engine, the feasibility of it just

• 16:48

improved in that regard.

• 16:50

Yeah.

• 16:51

Like one thing that a lot of people don't consider is how you bring all of the people

• 16:54

on a massive team like this to actually work on the same thing.

• 16:59

Because previously a lot of the files would be saved in larger chunks versus now in Unreal

• 17:04

Engine 5, things are saved as individual actors.

• 17:07

So people can actually access the same level simultaneously and contribute work to the

• 17:14

same features of the project or the same parts of the content without stepping on each other's

• 17:18

toes.

• 17:19

Right.

• 17:20

And from a workflow perspective, that is very nice to have because previously you would

• 17:24

have to wait as a handoff for some particular checkout to be checked back in before you

• 17:29

could start working.

• 17:30

Yeah, we'd lock each other out as well as the environment team very often.

• 17:35

Yeah.

• 17:36

That was a big problem.

• 17:37

Yeah, the workflow side for the environment team was a big relief.

• 17:41

And then finding out that someone had something you needed to make a specific engineering

• 17:45

change and then having to wait a couple days at the worst case to be able to access the

• 17:53

file.

• 17:54

Now you can just work on the same thing.

• 17:56

It's beautiful.

• 17:57

And tell me a little bit about kind of some of the performance related benefits that come

• 18:01

on the asset side, things like Nanite or just the visual fidelity of the world with things

• 18:06

like Lumen.

• 18:07

A lot of people hear terms like Lumen and Nanite and they just see that it looks awesome,

• 18:12

but you don't realize that these are also actually just fundamental changes to how the

• 18:17

graphics are handled under the hood because with Lumen, so previously a lot of people

• 18:25

are familiar with hardware accelerated ray tracing and...

• 18:29

So many people are familiar with that.

• 18:30

Yeah, simulating...

• 18:31

And the audience especially.

• 18:32

Yeah, simulating global illumination and shadows and like...

• 18:35

Well, it was a really big thing whenever graphics card companies were coming out and saying,

• 18:40

you know, this is going to be the new amazing tech and they were showing off...

• 18:43

I remember that.

• 18:44

We tested some of that with Tristan, I think back in 2017 or 18.

• 18:48

And we had little side by sides and watched the performance.

• 18:50

They're like, oh, ray tracing on, ray tracing off.

• 18:52

And one thing that Lumen does is it allows you to actually simulate ray tracing on the

• 18:58

software side.

• 18:59

So, well, it's not simulating ray tracing.

• 19:00

They're solving the same problem with a different solution with software simulated global illumination.

• 19:05

Instead of hardware simulated.

• 19:06

So now it's more accessible to people.

• 19:09

And that's why Lumen looks so amazing.

• 19:12

And that's actually one of the reasons why in early in the year when we showcased the

• 19:16

video transitioning over to Unreal Engine 5, we used that cave area to kind of show

• 19:23

the benefits of that global illumination bouncing, cascading off of the environment.

• 19:27

Yeah, exactly.

• 19:28

And you combine that with the virtualized geometry.

• 19:31

Yeah.

• 19:32

And it's a win.

• 19:33

Yeah.

• 19:34

Not to mention, obviously, the performance gains as well.

• 19:36

Because Nanite is per pixel geometry, which is amazing.

• 19:40

Like for large worlds, a lot of the times you have massive textures that are considered

• 19:46

virtualized.

• 19:47

And this is like a very common practice previously for handling giant textures as you virtualize

• 19:51

the texture, which means that it's now streaming from disk instead of all being loaded into

• 19:55

the memory at once.

• 19:57

And Nanite now provides that for geometry so you can stream in the geometry more granularly.

• 20:01

Which is huge.

• 20:02

Yeah, it's a pixel geometry, so it's pretty incredible.

• 20:04

That's very cool.

• 20:06

Now obviously it doesn't end with Unreal Engine 5.

• 20:10

As the community is aware, starting next month we're actually going to be making the move

• 20:15

over to 5.1.

• 20:16

Yeah.

• 20:17

And talk to me a little bit about what that process is going to entail and also what types

• 20:21

of benefit it's going to bring.

• 20:22

It should be a fairly smooth process, smoother than our initial...

• 20:28

Actually we did the pre-release version of 5.0 and that was a little rough.

• 20:32

But 5.1 should be better and we're looking forward to a lot of the performance gains,

• 20:37

especially with things like they're partitioning the nav mesh along the same lines as the world

• 20:42

partition.

• 20:43

And talk to us a little bit about what partitioning nav mesh means.

• 20:46

It means that different servers and different clients will have to can load partial sets

• 20:53

of the nav mesh instead of the whole nav mesh.

• 20:56

So it's a lot less memory.

• 20:58

And the nav mesh is essentially for people who don't know, that is how NPCs path around

• 21:03

the world eventually.

• 21:04

Correct.

• 21:05

And that's how they know where collision is and what they can move around and how they

• 21:08

get to a target location.

• 21:09

Exactly.

• 21:10

Don't walk through the tree, walk around it.

• 21:11

Right.

• 21:12

Absolutely.

• 21:13

And talk to me a little bit about the...

• 21:15

I know artists are very excited about 5.1.

• 21:17

Why is that?

• 21:18

Well, a lot of the features that were still in a beta form for the engine are now coming

• 21:24

online for as like more performant versions or more reliable versions.

• 21:29

So like the entire studio will be able to move over to DirectX 12 for our primary graphics

• 21:35

API, which that's going to save the artist a lot of headache because a lot of the time

• 21:40

somebody will be like, hey, this looks bad or like I'm getting these weird glitches on

• 21:43

the textures or I'm crashing.

• 21:45

And now, you know, a lot of it's just coming into maturity with 5.1.

• 21:49

And they're also incorporating Nanite as part, as I understand it, with the foliage actors

• 21:54

as well.

• 21:55

Yeah.

• 21:56

Yeah.

• 21:57

There's some talk of that.

• 21:58

Yeah.

• 21:59

Yeah.

• 22:00

Cool.

• 22:01

I know TechArt's a little excited about that.

• 22:02

Yeah.

• 22:03

Yeah.

• 22:04

They've been waiting for it for a long time.

• 22:05

Yeah.

• 22:06

Yeah.

• 22:07

I remember they were talking to me about it almost six months ago, I think.

• 22:10

Yeah.

• 22:11

Awesome.

• 22:12

So after we showcased our move to Unreal 5 earlier this year, we had a stream about

• 22:17

our character creator.

• 22:19

And this was something that for a long time we had been talking about kind of our goals

• 22:25

since 2017.

• 22:26

You know, what are some of the character creators that we've seen that we've loved in other

• 22:31

games?

• 22:32

Talk to me a little bit about your experience as a gamer first.

• 22:36

What are some of the things that you look for in a character creator and why you were

• 22:39

excited to bring something a little bit that level and beyond potentially with ours?

• 22:43

For me, it's the freedom of expression to make the character that you want to make.

• 22:49

Without the limitations that sometimes seem kind of arbitrary that developers put in.

• 22:55

I really enjoyed Baldur's Gate character creator.

• 22:57

I thought that was a lovely one that really made me feel like I was in a fantasy realm

• 23:05

crafting my own character.

• 23:06

As well from the, I guess, purely tech side of Black Desert Online, I really enjoyed the

• 23:13

more of the tactile, click and drag, the customized character.

• 23:18

The direct manipulation.

• 23:19

Exactly.

• 23:20

Yeah.

• 23:21

For me, it's usually, can I be green?

• 23:25

Can he be green?

• 23:26

Yeah.

• 23:27

Oh, it's like a lizard folk or an orc?

• 23:30

I'm just kidding.

• 23:31

All of the above.

• 23:32

All of the above.

• 23:33

You know, actually on that note, that's a great segue into one of my favorite character

• 23:38

creator stories, which was actually Oblivion back in, I think it was 2006, Elder Scrolls.

• 23:44

It wasn't like an amazing character creator, but they had a lot of options and you were

• 23:47

able to sort of manipulate it in a way that you could push the limits by dragging one

• 23:52

slider back and one slider the other way.

• 23:54

I would always make my person red or green just for fun.

• 24:00

Of course, we don't allow for that in our character creator.

• 24:02

We talk about only allowing positive results or adding constraints that you can have a

• 24:08

high degree of control while making sure that the final result is going to look good no

• 24:13

matter what.

• 24:14

Right.

• 24:15

And of course, good can be somewhat subjective.

• 24:18

Yeah, for sure.

• 24:19

But I want to make Igor.

• 24:21

Yes, exactly.

• 24:22

But whatever you see yourself as in this fantasy role-playing setting, you should be able to

• 24:28

make that in the character creator and express yourself.

• 24:30

Well, I thought the work that you guys did and that the artists did with bringing kind

• 24:36

of the first iteration of Ash's character creator to life was really phenomenal.

• 24:41

I know it got a lot of positivity and response from the community.

• 24:46

Talk to me a little bit about that process.

• 24:47

What did that entail?

• 24:50

That was a whole lot of R&D at first.

• 24:52

Yeah.

• 24:53

Just to see if it was, I guess, possible within the engine we're working in, especially like

• 24:58

what we wanted for it.

• 25:00

Yeah.

• 25:01

Because we had a lot of demands that we couldn't really point to in other games and be like,

• 25:05

let's just do that, you know?

• 25:06

Yeah.

• 25:07

And it was a bespoke functionality that was novel to Ash's.

• 25:12

And it's one thing to make it work in the character creator, and it's a completely different

• 25:17

thing to take the character that you made in the character creator and make that work

• 25:21

in game and make it performant.

• 25:24

And that's one thing that Zach played a huge role in was actually getting the assets gameplay

• 25:28

ready by threading the skeletal mesh merge process.

• 25:32

That was pretty awesome.

• 25:33

It wouldn't really be possible unless we did a lot of heavy tech in the background to make

• 25:39

it feasible.

• 25:40

Very cool.

• 25:41

And then another aspect, obviously, is the tech you guys worked on doesn't just facilitate

• 25:47

the front-facing character creator for the player, but it's also something that can be

• 25:51

utilized internally as a tool when creating NPCs, correct?

• 25:55

Yeah.

• 25:56

When we were in the ideation phase of character creator, we always thought that it'd be great

• 26:01

to have a customization suite for design so they can go in and make quest NPCs, they can

• 26:07

populate the world with their custom characters, they can go in and give life almost to each

• 26:12

individual NPC if they wanted to and really make them unique and customized.

• 26:17

Yeah.

• 26:18

Yeah.

• 26:19

And designers, of course, love having that tool available to them, right?

• 26:21

Oh, they love it.

• 26:22

Because they don't have to go and make specific requests necessarily to character on a particular

• 26:25

type of NPC.

• 26:27

They can just jump into the tool itself and create those things.

• 26:31

And of course, that technology isn't just restricted to humanoid type NPCs, but also

• 26:36

can be able to leverage across creature creators as well, potentially.

• 26:40

Is that true?

• 26:41

Well...

• 26:42

Big plans for that.

• 26:43

Yeah.

• 26:44

Yeah.

• 26:45

That one's...

• 26:46

It's still very much in the oven, but yeah, we want to leverage a lot of the technology

• 26:51

that we made for the character creator for things like animal husbandry and for populating

• 26:58

the world with unique variations of creatures as well.

• 27:02

Yeah.

• 27:03

Absolutely.

• 27:04

We're working towards that.

• 27:05

We're going to leverage that tech as much as possible.

• 27:06

Yeah.

• 27:07

Exactly.

• 27:08

Get the most out of it.

• 27:09

Yeah.

• 27:10

In creating the character creator, one of our biggest points of emphasis is while we're

• 27:12

making this is thinking about how it can be reused in other parts of the project.

• 27:16

Yeah.

• 27:17

Absolutely.

• 27:18

Because I can edit the size of my pug's eye.

• 27:22

To make them really oversized.

• 27:25

Talk to me a little bit about what...

• 27:27

We obviously talked a little bit about one of the aspects of the future uses for the

• 27:31

character creator with creatures potentially, but what are some of the other things you're

• 27:34

excited about to continue working on getting the character creator to a point where it's

• 27:40

going to be live for launch?

• 27:43

What are some of those features?

• 27:44

I know we took a lot of feedback from the community when they gave us responses during

• 27:48

the discussions thread about what they're looking for.

• 27:51

They talked a little bit about more hair options, more abilities to do tattoos, perhaps even

• 27:56

to customize those things.

• 27:57

What are some of the things you guys are excited to add?

• 28:00

Yeah.

• 28:01

So one thing that I'm really excited to work on next is the hair customization.

• 28:04

Well, a lot of the functionality for the hair customization is there, but I think that you

• 28:08

saw in the demo, it was still using sliders.

• 28:11

We really want to expand how much you can customize individually on the hair and also

• 28:16

incorporate that same mechanic of direct manipulation so that you're dragging different

• 28:21

parts of the hair or actually configuring it that way.

• 28:25

Especially with longer braids and jewelry and more of the granularity you can use to

• 28:31

really customize your character.

• 28:32

Yeah, we saw a lot of commentary about that.

• 28:35

And of course, players, as you guys understand, those might not always be available at the

• 28:40

inception of a particular character, but might be unlocked through achievements in game that

• 28:45

you can then revisit the character creator through salon services and nodes and start

• 28:50

to customize further as your character's history matures within the world.

• 28:54

Right?

• 28:55

Yeah.

• 28:56

That's one thing that I'm super excited for is the gameplay integration of the character

• 29:00

creator in real time and how we integrate different customization features and tie that

• 29:06

into your character progression.

• 29:08

I can't wait to see the different scars that I can unlock from a deadly battle.

• 29:14

Like reputation based tattoos.

• 29:16

Yeah, exactly.

• 29:17

Yeah, I've never seen that before.

• 29:20

That is cool.

• 29:21

Yeah, going into the tattoo parlor in the Dunir node and getting like a special Dunir

• 29:26

tattoo.

• 29:27

Oh my God.

• 29:28

It would be also cool as a feature if you're capable of inspecting other players, you know,

• 29:32

customization options and what they represent.

• 29:34

So if you do add the scar from the dragon fight, another person can see, ah, they have

• 29:38

a scar and it's from that dragon fight.

• 29:40

Yeah, exactly.

• 29:41

Yeah, that is super cool.

• 29:42

I love gameplay, I guess options, but we're going to give designers to be able to populate

• 29:47

the world with quests and reputation.

• 29:49

Yeah, yeah, that's super cool.

• 29:52

Very, very cool.

• 29:53

Well, awesome.

• 29:54

You know, I guess one final question that I would have for you guys is as someone who

• 30:01

takes a long time to create your character, do you generally just randomize and go or

• 30:08

do you sit there and fiddle with it?

• 30:11

I know that in an MMO setting, sometimes when you're making that character, and obviously

• 30:15

this is a service we've talked about offering is prior to launch, players will be able to

• 30:19

access the character creator and prep for that launch time because you want to get into

• 30:22

the server as quickly as possible.

• 30:23

You don't want to lose any time, right?

• 30:24

And trying to progress.

• 30:26

But do you guys like to fiddle with the character creator, spend a long time doing it, customizing

• 30:30

everything or do you just randomize and go?

• 30:33

Well, at first I do both actually.

• 30:35

Really?

• 30:36

At first I randomize them, go and I give the game, I'm super picky.

• 30:39

I give the game an hour and if I'm not captured in an hour, I get a refund.

• 30:45

A lot of people do that.

• 30:48

Then I spend two hours in the character creator making my real character.

• 30:52

Okay, so first you bet the game, then if you like it, you spend the time.

• 30:56

What about you guys?

• 30:57

Yeah, no, so normally I'll randomize to find a starting point that I like and then I'll

• 31:01

customize from there.

• 31:04

But normally I don't actually put a lot of time into the character creator.

• 31:08

Really?

• 31:09

Oh my gosh, the sacrilege.

• 31:11

I'm just kidding.

• 31:12

I spend a lot of time in character creators and if there's ever an option to mod it like

• 31:17

Skyrim, I'll add even more customization options like modded Skyrim just so I can have full

• 31:24

control and like if it's not a time gate or like I'm waiting to get into the game, if

• 31:30

I have like a single player game, I will spend a full play session.

• 31:36

I generally, if I'm starting a game, especially an MMO and I know that, I mean in the past

• 31:42

the MMOs that I've experienced, it was rare to kind of visit that character creator again

• 31:47

and get to change things.

• 31:48

So I would spend a lot of time building out the character, customizing things.

• 31:53

I don't know, I'm kind of a guppy for the role play side.

• 31:55

One of the nice things that Clayton did was he worked on a really nice randomization feature.

• 32:01

Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 32:02

Like if you're not one of those players like me that spends a lot of time in it, you can

• 32:09

just randomize through and you're going to get like amazing results every time and Clayton

• 32:15

did a really good job with just the breadth of the customization with the randomization

• 32:20

and then you can always use that to go off of it.

• 32:23

Yeah, I was having a fun time just kind of spamming that randomize button and just watching

• 32:27

the different shapes and figures and faces.

• 32:30

Just roll through the character creator, that was actually pretty cool.

• 32:33

Yeah, seeing how many different ones you could generate in a short amount of time, that's

• 32:37

neat.

• 32:38

And that's also, that's going to be at the forefront of our content designers ability

• 32:42

to populate the world with convincing good looking characters is a decent looking randomizing

• 32:47

feature.

• 32:48

Awesome.

• 32:49

Yeah, very cool.

• 32:50

Well guys, thank you for taking the time to chat with me and our audience.

• 32:53

We're going to have a fun little segment coming up next.

Meet our Environment, Art Tech, & Audio Lead

• 33:04

And welcome over into the environment and season side.

• 33:08

I am joined by three absolutely awesome members of the team.

• 33:12

Tristan, you want to introduce yourself?

• 33:13

I'm Tristan Snogress, I'm the lead environment artist here at Intrepid Studios.

• 33:17

Absolutely.

• 33:18

We also have Brian Ganz, lead tech artist.

• 33:21

And of course the amazing...

• 33:23

I'm Kat Nary and I am the audio lead at Intrepid.

• 33:26

Yay.

• 33:27

So we actually pulled off some fun feats this year and showcasing to the community some

• 33:32

pretty exciting stuff.

• 33:33

One of which was the seasons showcase.

• 33:37

And we did that in the Riverlands biome, is that right?

• 33:40

Correct.

• 33:41

That was the first biome that we actually implemented the actual tech that Brian and

• 33:45

Hal and James actually worked on.

• 33:47

Right.

• 33:48

And talk to me a little bit about that tech.

• 33:50

What did it entail?

• 33:52

You're just touching every single component of Unreal where a lot of things had to be

• 33:57

harmonized like the cloud, the volume cloud stuff and the particle effects for the rain

• 34:01

and the snow.

• 34:02

I think I mentioned it in the livestream for the...

• 34:05

Yeah, you did.

• 34:06

But yeah, that's...

• 34:07

There's just so many parts to it.

• 34:08

I mean, it was amazing to see.

• 34:09

Like, you know, we talked about it during, of course, the demonstration that I've never

• 34:12

personally experienced any type of tech like that in an MMORPG before where you actually

• 34:17

get to see the biome change in front of your eyes on a seasonal basis.

• 34:20

How difficult was that to achieve and how much did moving over to Unreal 5, we just

• 34:25

talked about in the previous segment, moving over to Unreal 5 help with that?

• 34:28

I think it helped with it a lot.

• 34:29

I think a lot of the cases in Unreal, the solve you're looking for is a button, button

• 34:34

press or a check block or something.

• 34:36

But there are a lot of different systems to harmonizing gameplay implications that...

• 34:42

And it's probably one of the hardest things is the planning out of how to start it so

• 34:47

that the whole approach is future proof and does everything you want it to do or might

• 34:51

want it to do.

• 34:52

Right.

• 34:53

Yeah.

• 34:54

And that, of course, has implications on the audio side because as an environment changes,

• 34:57

of course, the ambience doesn't sound the same.

• 34:59

Those things have to...

• 35:00

Those tracks have to change.

• 35:01

How was that implementing?

• 35:02

I mean, first, doing season tech is something I wanted to do for like 20 years in the game

• 35:08

industry.

• 35:09

So when I got to see what the artists were doing, I was really excited to work on this.

• 35:13

You know, you would think that there's just four seasons and so you make your four sounds

• 35:17

of summer, winter, fall, spring.

• 35:19

But we're going to go high tech and we're going to do eight variations that seamlessly

• 35:24

go through.

• 35:25

Ideally, you won't hear the changes because it'll be so seamless and they'll just kind

• 35:28

of go through.

• 35:29

Yeah.

• 35:30

It's something you don't get to see in the live streams right now because you do changes

• 35:32

in 30 seconds.

• 35:33

Right.

• 35:34

So when we do the sounds for them and as the audio team continues to grow, like right now,

• 35:38

I went out and recorded the rare rain in San Diego a couple of weeks ago.

• 35:41

Oh, so good.

• 35:42

I love listening to that.

• 35:43

So as the audio stuff gets into the game and as it grows, we'll go do more field recording.

• 35:48

You know, we try to make as much custom sounds as we can that fit the environment that we

• 35:51

see.

• 35:52

And I, of course, haven't received yet your itinerary of all the places in the world you

• 35:54

plan to travel to.

• 35:55

To collect those things.

• 35:56

Yeah.

• 35:57

I will be asking for reimbursement when I go to Fiji.

• 35:58

Yes, exactly.

• 35:59

I am more than happy to travel all over the world for you.

• 36:05

To collect the perfect references for the different types of assets.

• 36:08

Of course.

• 36:09

Yeah.

• 36:10

We can do that as well.

• 36:11

Talk to me a little bit about that.

• 36:12

So, the biomes, the animations, I know James did a lot of work on the seasonal showcase

• 36:15

for those assets.

• 36:16

How do you guys kind of derive what you're going to fill those biomes with?

• 36:20

So first, it was just trying to find some real world references that we could take as,

• 36:24

you know, inspiration.

• 36:25

Then, of course, we do get concept images derived from that, the add the fantasy flair

• 36:30

that we're going to have.

• 36:31

Right.

• 36:32

So then, you know, we want to do real world, but we're also doing high fantasy.

• 36:35

Yeah.

• 36:36

What kind of elements to it.

• 36:37

So, they chose Wales as essentially the biome for this, which is basically like where my

• 36:43

family is from.

• 36:44

Right.

• 36:45

So, I was like, all right, we're going with this.

• 36:46

I remember seeing your shots that you took while you were in Wales, and you were posting

• 36:50

them all throughout the art channels.

• 36:51

Oh, yeah.

• 36:52

And you were like, all right, this is great for this.

• 36:53

This is great for this.

• 36:54

And when we need more references, I called up my mom and was like, hey, you want to go

• 36:58

out to the garden and pick some photos?

• 36:59

I got a task for you.

• 37:00

They want to know what the ground looks like during winter.

• 37:03

It's simple.

• 37:04

I can get you that right now.

• 37:05

Do you fill out any Jira tasks for her when you ask her to do that stuff?

• 37:07

Yes, she's still asking for her money.

• 37:08

Okay.

• 37:09

We'll figure it out.

• 37:10

She's retired.

• 37:11

She's okay.

• 37:12

But yeah, so then we moved on to the desert biome after that.

• 37:15

And so, that wasn't necessarily seasonal tech implementation right there, but we had a whole

• 37:19

bunch of stuff to kind of think about how we wanted to approach seasonal tech from a

• 37:24

very different environment.

• 37:25

Right, especially like the one that's desolate as a desert.

• 37:28

Right.

• 37:29

And so, how do we make that environment change over four biomes and make it feel like unique

• 37:32

and interesting and different, but also not just do a traditional desert.

• 37:37

Yeah.

• 37:38

So, we'd like to make like the winters maybe slightly different that you might see in a

• 37:41

desert.

• 37:42

I know.

• 37:43

We talked a little bit about that.

• 37:44

And there's some cool stuff that we've done for things that might come down the line,

• 37:47

but one of the things that we wanted to do was also out here in Anza, Borrego, we get

• 37:52

the desert super blooms, which is where everything turns into like this beautiful painting of

• 37:56

color.

• 37:57

It's unbelievable.

• 37:58

Yeah, the flower blooms are just mind blowing.

• 38:00

Beautiful.

• 38:01

And there's some stuff that we have been trying to make happen that is going to probably blow

• 38:06

people's minds even more than we've already done with the riverland.

• 38:09

Absolutely.

• 38:10

And I think that people are going to be really excited to see that stuff.

• 38:13

I think just the glimpse that we got actually at the desert area, that desert biome, there's

• 38:17

already just such beauty that you did with the oasis and the tech across the rolling

• 38:23

winds over the sand dunes.

• 38:25

Talk to me a little bit about how you kind of accomplished the winds for the sand dunes.

• 38:29

There's a couple of techniques, I think.

• 38:31

A lot of times the environment artists will take a stab at what they want to do and then

• 38:35

I'll pick it up and work it and massage it in a little bit better with some of the systems

• 38:39

that are in there already.

• 38:41

Making it a little more functional than what an artist might be.

• 38:44

And performant.

• 38:45

Might perform as well.

• 38:46

But yeah, they know, they have an idea of what they want in their eye and I'm just like,

• 38:49

okay, I get it.

• 38:50

And let's kind of use that in a particle effect to do that as well.

• 38:54

Sometimes it's kind of like use a different system but in the same way that they're envisioning.

• 38:59

I try to cover all the different things Unreal can do, like the grass, the foliage, and the

• 39:04

virtual textures and everything.

• 39:05

And there's a lot of ways to do things but there's often the best way to do something.

• 39:10

And just kind of put that in there.

• 39:12

The heat distortion was done one way, let's put that in the particle system.

• 39:16

And they all kind of layer on top of each other, these different systems that you're

• 39:20

utilizing.

• 39:21

If you take one out, then the whole scene just kind of falls apart.

• 39:25

And now of course we have certain types of weather events that are of course going to

• 39:28

impact audio as well for these areas.

• 39:31

Like we talked a bit about one of the boss designs that are intended for the desert biome,

• 39:36

having this kind of whirlwind of sandstorm.

• 39:40

And when players get inside of those things, how does that kind of change audio?

• 39:43

Yeah, no, Brian's been awesome to work with because he's built a lot of systems that can

• 39:46

drive the audio dynamically.

• 39:48

So I'll go out and record various levels of sounds and then they'll procedurally change

• 39:53

in the game to really make you feel like you're in there.

• 39:56

Even the same with the trees, if you go under the trees right now with the wind, the little

• 39:59

leaves will kind of go up and down with the wind parameters that Brian's set up.

• 40:04

And it's really, really neat and really interactive.

• 40:06

And not just the winds, I noticed that as I kind of move through the game and I get

• 40:10

close to some of these particular foliage actors, I hear birds chirping or some type

• 40:15

of cue that just happens in the background.

• 40:17

The birds are super cool too because they're going to be assigned to certain trees.

• 40:21

And sometimes you'll find that really cool bird, you want to sit under it.

• 40:24

And then sometimes you'll find a bird that maybe you don't want to be near.

• 40:26

And so maybe you'll chop down that tree and take away his home or move away.

• 40:30

Oh no, that's terrible.

• 40:31

But you know, it's really cool.

• 40:32

That is actually very genius.

• 40:33

I noticed also, as we were kind of showcasing some of the ranger footage that design and

• 40:42

the combat engineers have been working on, there was that almost pollen-like fog that

• 40:48

was just throughout the level that created that almost morning dust look in that area.

• 40:53

Yeah, one of our newer artists, John Wainick, has actually been implementing all of those

• 40:57

kind of features to get...

• 40:59

That's just another atmospheric element that completely adds to the mood.

• 41:03

And those are seasonal as well, right?

• 41:04

Those are going to be tuned to specific seasons.

• 41:08

And not just seasons, also weather in general.

• 41:10

So you might get a foggy morning.

• 41:12

There's been several pretty amazing games recently that I've played that have some of

• 41:16

these elements.

• 41:17

And that really changes the vibe of when you're running around, like one day to another is

• 41:22

completely different.

• 41:23

And that's a great point.

• 41:24

Like we're all gamers.

• 41:25

We all play games in our spare time.

• 41:28

That's why we're in this industry is because we love games.

• 41:30

We like seeing the smiles on people's faces when we make something that excites them.

• 41:34

How much inspiration do you draw from the games that you play?

• 41:38

That's a tough question because there's so many different types of games that you can

• 41:41

play, obviously, and I don't really stick to one.

• 41:44

And none of them have a shortage of awe-inspiring feats that their dev teams accomplish as well.

• 41:48

And for me in particular, Red Dead Redemption is an amazing game where I could just ride

• 41:54

around and enjoy the nature all day.

• 41:57

Or the shenanigans that the horses have.

• 41:59

Yeah, all the little things.

• 42:01

But yeah, that specific game has a lot of atmospheric elements for when I'm running

• 42:05

around.

• 42:06

And not just the visual elements, but then the sound does kick in.

• 42:09

And sound to me is one of the things that really truly sells like a movie or a game.

• 42:16

Especially the music and such like that.

• 42:17

But if the audio doesn't feel right, then you know.

• 42:20

Yeah, absolutely.

• 42:21

I mean, that was something that was big for me.

• 42:24

Not just in gaming, but I find in many different forms of entertainment, especially media,

• 42:30

television, movies, like the soundtrack, the music that accompanies what's happening,

• 42:38

more often than not elicits stronger emotions from me than the visuals or the dialogue.

• 42:42

My goal for Vero Audio is you should be able to find a nice little safe place to sit down

• 42:47

and leave it on in the background as a nice ambient audio generator.

• 42:51

And you can go work on your thesis or whatever else you're working on, or just nice little

• 42:55

go to bed to it.

• 42:56

And I want you to feel like you're always in there.

• 42:59

That's what we need to do.

• 43:00

That's what I'm saying.

• 43:01

Yes, remember we used to talk about that so long ago.

• 43:02

First we'll do that.

• 43:03

We should totally throw up like a YouTube loop that people can just leave on.

• 43:07

Oh, that would be a great idea.

• 43:09

That's one way to fall asleep.

• 43:10

Yeah, absolutely.

• 43:11

So as we kind of, you know, look forward into 2023, what are some of the areas that you

• 43:18

guys have on your excited list of things to tackle, right?

• 43:23

What's the biome you're looking most forward to?

• 43:26

So the Redwood Forest is something that we're aiming to push into.

• 43:29

Oh my god.

• 43:30

We've already kind of started pushing into it slowly, but you know, just being surrounded

• 43:35

by giant massive trees that just don't seem to be making any sense of why they exist.

• 43:41

Like when you're walking through a Redwood Forest in real life, like up in Northern California,

• 43:45

it's awe-inspiring.

• 43:47

And there's a lot of cool, seasonal stuff that we can do with that.

• 43:51

So that's my...

• 43:52

Yeah, I was talking to design a little bit about group gameplay dynamics when we instituted

• 43:57

the gathering tech and having specific assets that require multiple players in order to

• 44:02

actually chop down a particular tree.

• 44:04

Yeah, I don't think you can really take down a Redwood with a simple person in their hands.

• 44:09

Ah, six swings, we're good.

• 44:11

We'll see how that plays out.

• 44:12

That's going to be an interesting feature to actually make work, because from the tech

• 44:15

side of things, I mean, I guess we'll be talking more about that later on today, but harvesting

• 44:21

tech is going to play into that.

• 44:22

Right.

• 44:23

And it's relevant, of course, to seasons, because not just the ambience and the audio

• 44:27

changes, but the assets that are available and spawn those changes well, and those have

• 44:31

actual economic implications when it comes to the world economy.

• 44:35

So yeah, that's super cool.

• 44:39

Well talk to me a little bit about kind of how you blend the work between setting up

• 44:44

these zones, these biomes for the seasonal aspects, and working with design to determine

• 44:50

which assets spawn when, how it's affected potentially by time of day, and a little bit

• 44:56

about working with design on setting up these biomes filled with different types of gatherables,

• 45:04

essentially, and how it's affected by season, right?

• 45:07

They have cycles, essentially.

• 45:09

There's going to be different types of plants, different types of foliage that you can harvest

• 45:12

during certain times of the year.

• 45:14

Brian, I guess you were probably going to be plugging that tech into all the harvestable

• 45:18

assets in the sense that you might get a certain plant in winter, but you're not going to get

• 45:21

it during the time where weather might affect that.

• 45:24

Right.

• 45:25

And we saw a little bit about that, not just with the assets, but also with the creatures

• 45:28

as well.

• 45:29

Correct.

• 45:30

Yeah.

• 45:31

And what went into making the creatures kind of change with the seasons?

• 45:35

Actually, it's not as difficult as it sounds.

• 45:37

That was probably the easiest answer.

• 45:38

Wait, don't say that.

• 45:39

It's very difficult.

• 45:40

No, I'm just kidding.

• 45:41

Very complex.

• 45:42

We can't give away the secrets.

• 45:43

Yeah, I can't give away the secrets.

• 45:44

It's probably hard for the guys at Epic to put it on the engine, but we just kind of knew

• 45:47

every material, every object has access to wind, direction, and speed, time of year,

• 45:52

time of day.

• 45:53

It's up to the artist to just kind of tap into these accessible variables and say, make

• 45:57

this color in the summer, a different color in winter.

• 46:01

It gets complicated when you start putting in more dynamics with like, we want a storm

• 46:06

in this area.

• 46:07

So we move across the world and it has gameplay implications and all the clients know if they're

• 46:12

in a storm or not.

• 46:15

To that whole process of working with designers and how to integrate what we can do and what

• 46:20

they want to do, I have to have like, here's the ambitious goal that everyone's talking

• 46:25

about, but we've got to fall back just in case.

• 46:28

I need a fallback plan.

• 46:30

A scale of achievability.

• 46:31

Push the really ambitious thing that's going to blow everyone's socks off.

• 46:37

And we usually hit the ambitious ones.

• 46:39

Yeah, somehow, some way it always works out.

• 46:41

And then of course, you have to think about all of these things from an audio perspective

• 46:45

where essentially you're layering on these different sounds and when does it become too

• 46:50

much if I've got a storm coming, I'm in combat with ten creatures, I've got players around

• 46:55

me with abilities and effects, and I've got dynamic music.

• 46:58

A great code team and we're also using audio kinetics, audio engine, both those things

• 47:03

with the code team and the audio engine will allow us to do some really cool dynamic mixing

• 47:08

that we'll get to choose what needs to be in focus.

• 47:11

And when you're in the storm, you're going to hear the storm, but if combat's coming

• 47:13

on and bigger things that need to be focused on, those are going to kind of come up while

• 47:16

the storm will go down.

• 47:17

So it's going to be all kinds of fire toys like that.

• 47:19

That's awesome.

• 47:20

That is awesome.

• 47:21

Well, with that being said, we are going to be moving over into our discussion about combat.

• 47:29

And I want to thank you guys for joining us and chatting a little bit about the seasons

• 47:33

and what it takes to actually make this stuff exist in game.

• 47:36

So awesome job guys.

• 47:38

And we will be seeing you in just a second.

Meet some of the Combat Crew

• 47:48

And we are back with a fun little discussion with some of our awesome developers who are

• 47:55

involved in the development of our combat and classes and special effects, all the fun

• 48:00

stuff that makes an MMO an MMO.

• 48:04

First thing I want to ask is for you guys each to introduce yourself.

• 48:07

It was you, Jim.

• 48:08

I'm Jim.

• 48:09

I am the lead effect art.

• 48:10

Yes.

• 48:11

Trap.

• 48:12

Yep.

• 48:13

I'm Trap Thompson.

• 48:14

I'm a senior combat designer on the project.

• 48:16

Awesome.

• 48:17

Keenan.

• 48:18

I'm Keenan.

• 48:19

I'm a gameplay engineer.

• 48:20

Mostly work on combat and movement.

• 48:22

So we have shown some fun stuff this year.

• 48:25

And I think the audience of course would agree that the look at Ashes development since the

• 48:32

start of 2022 has ramped up in a very fun and engaging way for the community to kind

• 48:38

of take a look at how development works here.

• 48:40

You guys all are involved in a process of course that is very near and dear to many

• 48:44

players hearts, which is the identity of their archetypes, the abilities they have access

• 48:49

to those classes, how they interact from a role perspective with combat in general in

• 48:53

the game.

• 48:54

What are some of the inspirations?

• 48:55

What are some games that you guys have played in the past that kind of helped to influence

• 49:00

decisions that we make on Ashes?

• 49:01

Oh, you know, that's a good question because if you're playing an MMO, you're going to

• 49:07

have to think of kind of the big players out there.

• 49:09

And I got thousands of hours in World of Warcraft and that will definitely influence how I shaped

• 49:15

kind of some of the iconic imagery, the colors and shapes.

• 49:19

I think really a lot of that motivation comes back to the feedback I get from the community

• 49:24

and from the developers.

• 49:25

Like Tread is always kind of saying, Hey man, what about this shape or this size?

• 49:29

Or I'm thinking about this mechanic.

• 49:31

Yeah.

• 49:32

So I guess it's a circular, circle.

• 49:34

Absolutely.

• 49:35

I mean, all of us have been experiencing MMOs.

• 49:37

I mean, we're all MMO gamers.

• 49:38

That's part of the question that I ask in the final interview.

• 49:41

You come up with your favorite MMOs.

• 49:43

The real qualifying.

• 49:44

Yes, the qualifying question.

• 49:45

Tread, what are some MMOs or games in general that you draw inspiration from?

• 49:50

There are so many I would have to narrow that down to.

• 49:53

I'll pick an MMO since that's the most relevant.

• 49:56

And I'd say the most influential MMO on me, on just as a gamer has been Dark Age of Camelot.

• 50:03

I remember actually our interview when you asked me about my MMO experience.

• 50:07

That was the one I chose to talk about.

• 50:09

I loved it.

• 50:10

It was such a fun game.

• 50:11

Yeah.

• 50:12

Yeah.

• 50:13

That was really the game I think that really, well that and RuneScape, if you qualify RuneScape

• 50:18

as an MMO, that one as well.

• 50:20

But Dark Age was really where I think I realized the magic of an MMO and it really is what

• 50:27

got me into open world PvP and that's what really excites me about this project is bringing

• 50:31

that kind of thing back.

• 50:33

Just that really spontaneous gameplay that you run into out in the field and you never

• 50:37

know what to expect.

• 50:38

Absolutely.

• 50:39

Yeah.

• 50:40

What about you, Keenan?

• 50:41

For me, I think it's probably WoW.

• 50:45

Specifically the re-release of vanilla WoW, Classic WoW, I thought that was a phenomenal

• 50:52

experience.

• 50:53

I actually never played in vanilla.

• 50:54

Oh really?

• 50:55

So that was your first time with Classic WoW?

• 50:57

That was my first time with Classic and I feel like it brought back some of the old

• 51:01

school adventure that a lot of us have been missing.

• 51:03

That feeling back, yeah, the nostalgia.

• 51:04

Yeah, we've got a group playing right now.

• 51:06

Oh yeah?

• 51:07

Really?

• 51:08

Hopefully we'll start back up again on Old War.

• 51:10

Very cool.

• 51:12

So obviously, as our audience has kind of seen throughout the year and they're kind

• 51:17

of seeing now as we put little clips into this particular video, we've shown off a little

• 51:22

bit of the ranger, we've shown off a little bit of basic weapon attacks and melee, some

• 51:27

of the fighter skills, we've shown off the cleric most recently.

• 51:31

Tell me a little bit about the process that goes into actually making these archetypes.

• 51:36

Obviously the ability side is very important that needs to have support from engineering

• 51:40

and the effects and stuff, but what typically goes into, and we have a lot of classes to

• 51:44

make, right, and we're deep within the thralls of that process, but what does it take?

• 51:48

Yeah, I could start on that.

• 51:51

So obviously a class has to, or an archetype has to start on paper, right?

• 51:57

A lot of the time we'll go into prototyping and start building out stuff and see what's

• 52:00

fun but just about always we start on paper on a design document.

• 52:05

And we're talking about specific abilities when we start out on paper, right?

• 52:10

First we actually go about establishing the class fantasy and the identity and the role

• 52:14

within the party, right?

• 52:17

Because that really helps to inform what those abilities then are.

• 52:22

So that's usually the first step is, you know, what is this archetype?

• 52:24

What identifies it?

• 52:25

What is the role that it's trying to accomplish?

• 52:28

Once that is done then we go into what you're suggesting there where, you know, we'll go

• 52:33

and brainstorm a whole wide list of abilities and class mechanics and then once we've got

• 52:39

all those, you know, a lot of them will get the chopping block and some of them will make

• 52:43

it through, some will get iterated and, you know, kind of redesigned, reimagined.

• 52:48

And then after that step usually we go to you and we have a sort of review meeting and,

• 52:55

you know, you'll pick ones that you like, you'll pick ones you want to change.

• 52:58

That's the second chopping block.

• 52:59

The second chopping block, yeah, there you go.

• 53:02

We try and filter it on our end as much as Steven makes sure it gets done one way or

• 53:07

another.

• 53:08

And then, you know, once that's done then we jump into the prototyping, right?

• 53:13

Then it starts down the pipeline process, right?

• 53:15

Yeah, yeah.

• 53:16

And rapid prototyping is a really important step of the design process for combat because

• 53:21

we want to build and fail early or, you know, succeed early.

• 53:26

And we find the fun, we find what's not fun.

• 53:28

And we can all do that within, you know, the tools that our very talented engineers provide

• 53:33

us and we're always working to improve that stuff.

• 53:36

And the better tools we have, the better the designers can do their job.

• 53:39

And of course engineering kind of fields requests from a capability standpoint on what design

• 53:45

can actually provide a particular ability to do, right?

• 53:49

Talk to me a little bit about, you know, how you field those requests, how you incorporate

• 53:53

that as part of the ability system, all those things.

• 53:56

Well we always do feasibility on any requests that we get, but our designers are really

• 54:00

good about that and we don't usually have too many issues there.

• 54:04

Usually, yeah, I like to run wild sometimes.

• 54:09

For me as an engineer though, I think a lot of times the challenge is in, you know, they're

• 54:15

trying to get the fantasy right and the question is like, how do you make somebody who's playing

• 54:21

a game feel like they are being delivered on that fantasy?

• 54:25

So when design asks us for something, we usually play it a lot ourselves as we're making it

• 54:29

and we search for that feeling and, you know, we're all gamers so we know what it feels

• 54:33

like so we're looking for it as we build it.

• 54:35

That's one of my favorite things is I'm walking past your desk going to my office, sometimes

• 54:39

you'll just be like, hey Steven, you got two minutes.

• 54:41

And then you put me at your desk at the keyboard and you're like, how does this feel?

• 54:45

Do you feel like a ranger?

• 54:46

I know, do you feel like a ranger?

• 54:48

Does this sword slash feel good?

• 54:50

Yeah, absolutely.

• 54:51

I mean, and obviously, you know, you guys, you and Adam have had a very instrumental hand

• 54:55

as part of working with design and visual effects to kind of capture not just that role,

• 55:00

but that feeling as you described, and sometimes that incorporates working with animators to

• 55:05

get the right types of author animations for like particular weapon attacks and or abilities,

• 55:11

and the timing on those things is pivotal in creating the right feeling, right?

• 55:16

There's so many technical components to it and as is often the case with engineering,

• 55:20

it's like eliciting that right human response out of the very mathematical thing is the

• 55:26

challenging part.

• 55:27

Yeah.

• 55:28

And Jim, obviously, you know, audio and visual effects, they come in kind of near the end

• 55:32

of that pipeline where, you know, design and engineering has provided the tools to design,

• 55:38

designs iterating with authored animations, and then VFX comes in and says, how can I

• 55:43

make this look spectacular?

• 55:44

I mean, there's a tremendous amount of thought that's already been placed into this mechanic

• 55:50

or designer ability or whatever.

• 55:53

So on top of that, we're thinking about how can we push the MMO space?

• 55:57

We don't want to recreate the other games.

• 55:59

We want to make it our own game.

• 56:00

I mean, we want to push the effects to a level that you just don't see in the industry period,

• 56:05

but at the same time, we don't want to create visual effects soup.

• 56:08

So we're working on creating a visual language, something that the gamers here are playing

• 56:13

are going to understand like, hey, that's like an arcane ability or that's like a tank

• 56:18

mixed with this, you know, summoner or whatever.

• 56:20

So we have to figure out how to do all of this, not make it too muddy, but actually

• 56:24

execute in a way that looks cool, so it's really, really nice to have people like Trad

• 56:28

and our engineer team to go back and forth and be like, hey, can we connect this beam

• 56:32

here?

• 56:33

Can I parameterize it and can we expose this to the UI guys so we can ramp it up or down

• 56:37

to do stuff?

• 56:38

Yeah, and you hit on a really interesting point, which is visual effects is obviously

• 56:42

not just about creating things that are awesome, but the language that communicates in the

• 56:47

style guide of how these effects translate to particular classes from just a silhouette

• 56:52

perspective, shape language or visual fidelity and the hues and colors that are used to communicate

• 56:57

at long distances like, hey, I know what I'm going up against, especially if it's a PvP

• 57:02

scenario, or if you see your group kind of doing something, there are visual cues for

• 57:06

you to respond appropriately and synergistically from a rotations perspective.

• 57:10

And that's something I know early on, you know, we worked with each other kind of going

• 57:14

through you and the VFX team across, you know, what those shapes languages should look like

• 57:18

for particular types of abilities, the colors that should be associated with particular

• 57:22

types of archetypes, the symbologies and iconography that's used as part of those particular visual

• 57:27

effects, some of which obviously people saw in the last cleric demonstration.

• 57:32

But how has that been for you kind of defining those things and creating that style guide?

• 57:36

I mean, it's a comprehensive list, there's 64 classes, right?

• 57:40

And how do you steer and make sure that it doesn't become that visual suit that so many

• 57:45

people I mean, I've played games where it does become visual suit.

• 57:50

And especially it starts to break down every 10th player you add into the mix or every

• 57:55

10th, you know, actor NPC or whatever, right?

• 57:58

How do we accomplish that?

• 57:59

Well, I love that question.

• 58:01

So I mean, I'm a gamer.

• 58:03

And I think that especially in MMOs, when you get to that in game content, and you're

• 58:07

in this huge raid, whether it's like 10 people or 100 people, and all of a sudden, it's like

• 58:11

you can't find your mouse cursor, you're like, if you don't hotkey, you're lost, right?

• 58:15

So, but to answer your question, we're not.

• 58:18

Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to give that to the player.

• 58:20

So the player is going to be able to tune that experience.

• 58:24

So we are going to create a very smart parameterized subset of matrix particle systems.

• 58:31

That's a fancy way of saying that we're going to let you tune what it's like in single player

• 58:35

versus maybe you and your buddy versus a five person party or a giant raid.

• 58:40

Not only that, but let's make it where we can change the camera shake.

• 58:43

And the post process and a particle intensity and then do a global one that scales all of

• 58:48

that.

• 58:49

And give that to the player because I mean, really visual soup is a thing, but there's

• 58:52

a scale that's subjective kind of to the player on how much they want to see of those things

• 58:58

happening in a particular area.

• 58:59

And this is something obviously you guys who've been following the project for a long time

• 59:02

is what we've talked at since the very inception of Ashes is a desire to tackle that particular

• 59:08

issue that many of us have experienced in other games, of course.

• 59:12

So talk to me a little bit about our 64 classes, right?

• 59:16

In those roles, those class fantasies, where do we kind of live when incorporating?

• 59:21

And obviously we have an eight member party, right?

• 59:24

And we have eight archetypes that are associated across our game.

• 59:27

And people know it's kind of a matrix of eight by eight in which creating these classes,

• 59:31

the augment system, all that type of stuff.

• 59:33

People have just now been starting to get a peek under the hood of the creation of these

• 59:36

archetypes and these classes.

• 59:38

What are you most excited to kind of tackle come 2023?

• 59:42

I know that there's a lot of stuff in the works right now and building up towards Alpha

• 59:45

Two.

• 59:46

Of all 64 of them.

• 59:47

Yes, yes.

• 59:48

Probably the Dreadnought because that's my default character.

• 59:53

But actually, I don't know that there's any particular class yet.

• 59:57

I mean, we haven't even shown everybody all the archetypes yet.

• 1:00:00

But I will say I'm pretty excited to see what the Summoner becomes.

• 1:00:04

We haven't shown anything on the Summoner and I'm not necessarily a pet class player

• 1:00:09

myself, but I feel like every Summoner type class that I've seen in games, they usually

• 1:00:16

fall a little bit flat in my opinion.

• 1:00:18

Maybe that's why I don't play them, right?

• 1:00:21

But I'd like to see something a little bit more dynamic with like, you know, summoning

• 1:00:26

in real time in combat rather than, oh, I summon my pet right at the beginning of combat

• 1:00:30

and then it's done.

• 1:00:31

It's out there doing its own thing.

• 1:00:33

I think there's a lot left to be explored there.

• 1:00:37

In fact, we've already written up some stuff about it.

• 1:00:39

Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 1:00:40

And it's some stuff that we've shared a little bit with the community.

• 1:00:42

Just a little bit.

• 1:00:43

Just a little bit, but I think they're going to be excited to see next year kind of some

• 1:00:47

of the stuff that's gone into that.

• 1:00:48

What about you, Keenan?

• 1:00:49

What are you kind of excited about from either a technical challenge perspective when it

• 1:00:52

comes to these ability systems or combat in general or class wise?

• 1:00:58

I think if you're talking about what I'm most excited to work on, I would say all of the

• 1:01:02

bard classes.

• 1:01:03

Ah, okay.

• 1:01:04

I think that the bard seems to have been largely forgotten by modern gaming.

• 1:01:09

So I'm excited to bring it back and show off some of the cool ideas that we have.

• 1:01:13

Yes, I think next year as well people are going to be excited to see how that class

• 1:01:16

interacts from a support perspective for the party and how it kind of lives next to but

• 1:01:22

doesn't encompass the same space as the healer, which is what a lot of previous games I think

• 1:01:27

that try to bring in that bard perspective do.

• 1:01:29

They just throw it on top of the healer's role.

• 1:01:31

And that can be a little bit boring.

• 1:01:33

There's a lot more to support than health bar goes right.

• 1:01:36

Right.

• 1:01:37

Health bar goes right.

• 1:01:38

Whack.

• 1:01:39

Whack a mole pole too.

• 1:01:40

Agreed.

• 1:01:41

How about you, Jim?

• 1:01:42

What about you on the visual effects side?

• 1:01:43

I know you guys got a lot of fun tech working with tech art teams for supporting visual

• 1:01:49

effects, not just from a class perspective, but also on the monster side, NPC encounter

• 1:01:53

side as well.

• 1:01:54

Oh yeah.

• 1:01:55

I mean, we're going to have so much fun.

• 1:01:56

Like monsters and boss fights are going to be unreal because we can just dial that up

• 1:01:59

and really have fun with all the actual tech that's built in the engine, the custom tech.

• 1:02:04

I think from just like a real technical perspective, I'm super excited about augments.

• 1:02:10

I want to do the augmentations and see how these different classes interact and how we

• 1:02:14

can create like the difference between a cleric and a paladin, for example.

• 1:02:19

But from just a selfish point of view, all about the necromancer man.

• 1:02:23

It's going to be incredible.

• 1:02:24

I don't think you're alone there, buddy.

• 1:02:25

It's going to be amazing.

• 1:02:26

And we showed off a little bit, some of the augments, I don't know if everyone picked

• 1:02:33

up on them during some of the demonstrations.

• 1:02:35

There were a few abilities that had some of the augments associated with them, but next

• 1:02:40

year I think in preparation for Alpha 2, there's going to be a lot of that stuff that players

• 1:02:44

are going to get access to and kind of see.

• 1:02:47

You know, it's something that's interesting to me is I think next month we're showcasing

• 1:02:51

the tank archetype and we're going to be showing some of those abilities and within the next

• 1:02:56

couple of months, I might have actually just leaked that.

• 1:02:59

I'm so sorry.

• 1:03:00

Okay, so a little leak in today's video.

• 1:03:03

But within the next couple of months, or I think it's the next two to three months, we're

• 1:03:11

also going to be talking a little bit about showcasing one of the big raid bosses, the

• 1:03:16

Cyclops.

• 1:03:17

And I know that has a lot of visual effects that's going into that encounter, as well

• 1:03:20

as some unique mechanics that are associated with supporting some of that ability that

• 1:03:25

the actual Cyclops has available.

• 1:03:27

And I think people are going to be a little bit shocked by that because it's pretty cool.

• 1:03:31

Well, it's going to be epic.

• 1:03:33

It's going to be insane.

• 1:03:34

I mean, you have this unique problem with big bosses in general.

• 1:03:39

Now I'm going to leak a little more.

• 1:03:41

Hopefully you guys don't have to edit this out.

• 1:03:43

Oh yeah, I'm ready.

• 1:03:44

I'm scared, but I'm ready.

• 1:03:45

So we're going to have this monstrous creature just going across our terrain.

• 1:03:48

It's not going to be your flat arena that you see in every MMO.

• 1:03:52

It's going to have different heights, altitudes, obstacles to climb on.

• 1:03:55

And we got to solve for that.

• 1:03:56

We don't want our effects just hanging in there.

• 1:03:58

We want to mold to the terrain and do different stuff.

• 1:04:01

But I think that's going to be something that I'm really excited about.

• 1:04:04

It's really technical, but it's also going to be something that people are really going

• 1:04:07

to dig.

• 1:04:08

They're going to enjoy it.

• 1:04:09

Oh, for sure.

• 1:04:10

I totally agree.

• 1:04:11

Every little edge case we missed is going to be scaled up 20x.

• 1:04:13

Oh yes.

• 1:04:14

And that's part of the greatness of kind of showcasing.

• 1:04:17

It's how we figure it out.

• 1:04:18

Yes, exactly.

• 1:04:19

And as we get to encounter those problems as the course that we're bringing this to

• 1:04:24

life, and as we're addressing them, we're showing the community as well.

• 1:04:28

That's something that's super cool.

• 1:04:29

Another thing, obviously we're building a massively multiplayer game.

• 1:04:34

And a lot of our encounter design, a lot of the PvP scenarios that players are going to

• 1:04:39

be subjected to, those are very dense populations.

• 1:04:44

And when you're building out this concept of these ability systems, how much of that

• 1:04:50

massively multiplayer component gets taken into account when creating, ideating, so to

• 1:04:55

speak, these mechanics that are provided by engineering, but also the class kits as a

• 1:04:59

holistic view, what abilities we're actually authoring.

• 1:05:03

Do you take into that account?

• 1:05:04

Or is this something that's really more focused around solo gameplay, group gameplay, or massive

• 1:05:10

gameplay?

• 1:05:11

Oh, we've got to think about all of it.

• 1:05:13

From the ground up, in that phase I was talking about earlier, the ideation phase when we're

• 1:05:18

brainstorming these abilities, we always, always have to think about how does this scale

• 1:05:23

up.

• 1:05:24

A lot of games have the luxury of not having to do that.

• 1:05:27

They can design a number of abilities without even having to necessarily consider the performance

• 1:05:34

implications it would have in a networking environment.

• 1:05:37

There's a lot of additional things as designers and engineers and artists that we've got to

• 1:05:43

think about every time.

• 1:05:44

So it kind of blows up the scale of, it can be a little bit mind paralysis sometimes when

• 1:05:51

you think, but we get through it and we've gotten pretty good at it.

• 1:05:55

From a performance as authoring these visual effects, how useful has the migration of Unreal

• 1:06:01

5 been with the use of Niagara in its system?

• 1:06:04

It's key.

• 1:06:05

It's very critical.

• 1:06:06

So every single effect that we author, we have to author for different scenarios, how

• 1:06:10

far away it might be, when we might call stuff, how close it's going to be.

• 1:06:13

We're also going to call stuff.

• 1:06:14

There's no point in having something that just blocks your entire view.

• 1:06:18

So all this will happen in real time dynamically.

• 1:06:20

So we can scale down particle systems based on how many players are active or how your

• 1:06:25

performance might be changing or anything really.

• 1:06:28

Maybe it's a Thanksgiving day and we want to have less effects.

• 1:06:31

We can do that.

• 1:06:32

But it's super robust with the amount of control we have over every aspect of visual effects.

• 1:06:38

And we'll be needing to do all of that to set all these things up because we don't want

• 1:06:42

to have a situation where, oh yeah, our game is really great until we got into the open

• 1:06:46

world PvP and all that stuff.

• 1:06:47

So we're not going to make this...

• 1:06:49

The effect should be there, but it shouldn't be.

• 1:06:52

That's all you see.

• 1:06:53

Right.

• 1:06:54

It's complementing absolutely the mechanics and the gameplay 100%.

• 1:06:57

Keenan, obviously on the engineering side, the gameplay engineering side, you of course

• 1:07:01

have to field these requests for different types of mechanics that need to be authored.

• 1:07:05

But when you think about performance-related considerations for the ability systems, stats

• 1:07:11

to kind of quickly update, all of the stuff interacting with the network, how has that

• 1:07:16

been for you from a challenging standpoint?

• 1:07:18

Yeah.

• 1:07:20

With the scalability requirement cranked to 10, it pretty much makes every aspect of combat

• 1:07:24

like three times harder than it would otherwise be.

• 1:07:28

But ultimately, I think we've got a handle on it and we've been very intentional with

• 1:07:34

our data and with our systems so that we can modulate how quickly they receive and send

• 1:07:40

updates based on who cares the most.

• 1:07:43

And so that's going to help us with scalability a lot.

• 1:07:45

That's something that I think a lot of players kind of were noticing in Alpha 1 last year

• 1:07:51

was just the sheer density that was achieved during some of the Castle Siege fights that

• 1:07:56

we had where there were 300 plus players in a particular area.

• 1:08:00

Not many people, I think in today's age, have experienced that and experienced in a way

• 1:08:04

that was performant.

• 1:08:07

And that was something that I think is wholly unique to this project and what we're trying

• 1:08:11

to achieve and accomplish, not just from the combat's perspective and these class kits

• 1:08:15

that we're creating, but how they harmonize with many players in a particular area.

• 1:08:19

So you guys have been doing an awesome job on that.

• 1:08:22

Well, thank you guys for joining us and talking a little bit about what it takes to make this

• 1:08:26

magic come to life.

• 1:08:28

I think I speak on behalf of the community.

• 1:08:30

You guys are doing an awesome job and not just you, of course, the teams that work in

• 1:08:33

association with you and that you're a part of, we're really appreciative of that.

Meet a few of the developers behind Gathering and Crafting

• 1:08:45

Welcome over to our conversation, a little bit about gathering and crafting.

• 1:08:49

And earlier this year, of course, we showed some of the recent work that's been done towards

• 1:08:54

gathering, particularly around trees and the bushes and mining.

• 1:09:00

But I'm joined today by some of the developers who worked on those things.

• 1:09:04

So a little introduction, Hal.

• 1:09:07

I am Hal Anderson, and I'm an environment artist.

• 1:09:10

So that means I work on things like rocks, trees, kind of anything you just see in the

• 1:09:14

environment.

• 1:09:15

Everything that makes the world beautiful.

• 1:09:16

And we also have Alex.

• 1:09:19

Hello, I'm Alex Cudoli.

• 1:09:21

I'm a senior gameplay engineer.

• 1:09:23

I'm a generalist.

• 1:09:24

I wear many hats.

• 1:09:26

I work with animation, environment, many departments.

• 1:09:29

All the things they say.

• 1:09:31

Exactly.

• 1:09:32

We have Cory.

• 1:09:33

Hi, I'm Cory Rice.

• 1:09:34

I'm a technical designer, and I usually focus on artist and ship, do a little work with

• 1:09:38

AI and also our design tools.

• 1:09:40

Yeah, and a lot of economy stuff too as well, yeah?

• 1:09:43

Yeah.

• 1:09:44

So obviously, a lot of people saw the gathering demonstration that we showed where currently

• 1:09:49

like harvesting trees and stuff.

• 1:09:51

We just talked about what goes into kind of inspiring you guys around the experiences

• 1:09:58

you've had in other MMOs or other games where you're out and you're gathering things and

• 1:10:02

crafting.

• 1:10:03

What are some of the favorite experiences you guys have had?

• 1:10:06

I think for me personally, one of my favorite kind of like harvesting things that I really

• 1:10:12

love in an MMO would be just all the little plants you find around in elder schools online.

• 1:10:18

Yes, they're so good.

• 1:10:20

Oh my gosh, there's so many of them too.

• 1:10:23

I love just kind of scouring the environment, kind of seeing what you can find.

• 1:10:27

I think they have such good design too.

• 1:10:28

You can always like visually really spot them, like, oh, that's gonna go over there.

• 1:10:32

See what I can find.

• 1:10:34

Yeah, what about you, Ock?

• 1:10:35

For me, probably realism, specifically ArcheAge.

• 1:10:40

I spent a lot of time scouring all the lands to find illegal farms, all of that, but like

• 1:10:47

any trees.

• 1:10:48

But the fun part about it is like after a while, you go outside and be like, oh, I know

• 1:10:52

what that tree is.

• 1:10:53

Oh, I know what that tree is.

• 1:10:54

A little bit of learning from the game.

• 1:10:55

Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:56

And then you're like, oh, this is an Aspen tree.

• 1:10:57

I know that.

• 1:10:58

I do like that too, where there's a hint of realism kind of in what you're experiencing

• 1:11:02

the game and how you can associate that with the real world.

• 1:11:05

What about you, Cory?

• 1:11:06

Yeah, totally.

• 1:11:07

I really like the exploration part of it.

• 1:11:09

Searching around for things and like how mentioned there being like things that catch your eye

• 1:11:13

and oftentimes you're like, oh, there's some gold.

• 1:11:16

And then you find yourself at the bottom of the dungeon and you're like, oh god, what

• 1:11:19

am I doing here?

• 1:11:20

Maybe meet some friends.

• 1:11:21

Wait a minute.

• 1:11:22

That's not a friend.

• 1:11:23

Exactly.

• 1:11:24

This guy's trying to take my gold.

• 1:11:25

And then we fight.

• 1:11:26

And then we fight.

• 1:11:27

And yeah, just get you into all sorts of different adventurous situations.

• 1:11:30

It's such an important part, obviously, of MMO design, right?

• 1:11:34

It brings kind of the environment that you're in, the world that you're in, and it makes

• 1:11:37

it a bit tactile.

• 1:11:38

It makes it something that you can leverage to further advance your character, your position,

• 1:11:43

the wealth that you might have.

• 1:11:45

And one of the things that I think was really interesting about our approach on these gatherables

• 1:11:52

out in the real world was even simulating a bit more of that realism, not just from

• 1:11:56

the type of thing you're gathering, but how that thing interacts with you in the world.

• 1:12:00

And one of the things that sticks out is the design of these trees falling and the physics

• 1:12:05

associated with them.

• 1:12:06

And I know we talked a little bit about during the demonstration, but you know, talk a little

• 1:12:09

bit about what it took to get there from a tech feasibility perspective.

• 1:12:13

Oh, it's a lot of work.

• 1:12:15

I mean, it's a lot of cross departmental work.

• 1:12:20

For example, like we have to work, figure out how we want to simulate the physics, what

• 1:12:25

kind of collisions we want to have to have on trees, as well as making sure that they

• 1:12:32

simulate similarly on every client as well, so that it doesn't feel off-putting for one

• 1:12:37

player to see it falling to the left, for other players falling to the right.

• 1:12:40

Like, oh my God, this tree just hit me.

• 1:12:42

No, it didn't.

• 1:12:43

It hit that guy.

• 1:12:44

Exactly.

• 1:12:45

Yeah.

• 1:12:46

So, but yeah, no, physics is, as I was saying before, it's a wild beast to tame.

• 1:12:50

It's just a lot of tweaks.

• 1:12:52

You have to have a lot of patience figuring out all the constraints, you know, all the

• 1:12:57

volumes.

• 1:12:58

It's just hard work.

• 1:13:00

And even from a performance perspective, right, we have thousands of foliage actors that might

• 1:13:06

live within a particular area that's very small, maybe one and a half by one and a half

• 1:13:10

kilometers zone, right?

• 1:13:11

Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:13

And you want to make sure it's per request, so as you're chopping down, so it's not always,

• 1:13:18

you know, there, otherwise, you know, our client FPS is probably going to be pretty

• 1:13:22

bad.

• 1:13:23

Right.

• 1:13:24

So we do a neat trick when you are coming up to the tree, we swapped it to skeletal

• 1:13:28

mesh and then you cut it down and then as it starts to fall, we start simulating physics.

• 1:13:35

And as it falls down, we kind of like freeze it up in the end and then slowly like dissipates.

• 1:13:40

Right.

• 1:13:41

And Hal, tell me a little bit about what it takes to actually bring one of those assets

• 1:13:45

with joints and a skeletal rig so that the impact on the tree can show the physics and

• 1:13:51

the branches moving.

• 1:13:52

What did that take from an environment perspective?

• 1:13:54

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:13:56

So I think definitely got a lot of help from animation, you know, all the animators on

• 1:14:02

our team kind of setting that set up.

• 1:14:03

But I think from an environment perspective, our kind of most challenging thing was kind

• 1:14:07

of setting up the skeletal rig so they can all kind of communicate efficiently and kind

• 1:14:12

of finding a nice balance between so like, you know, one branch doesn't have all the

• 1:14:16

weight, you know, it's able to kind of fall and be in a fluid.

• 1:14:20

Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:14:21

And you have to make different states as well, right?

• 1:14:23

Because it's not just about being able to gather this particular thing in the world,

• 1:14:29

but also at what stage is that thing?

• 1:14:31

Is it an adolescent?

• 1:14:32

Is it a young tree?

• 1:14:34

What type of harvest can I get from it if I were to, let's say, gather it earlier in

• 1:14:38

its lifespan, right?

• 1:14:39

That has some design principles associated with those.

• 1:14:41

Yeah, definitely.

• 1:14:42

Like we wanted it to look good when it falls down, but we also wanted the environment to

• 1:14:46

look really good during different seasons and different stages of life of the thing

• 1:14:50

that you're harvesting.

• 1:14:51

So not only did they have to do that work one time making a tree look good, but we wanted

• 1:14:56

it to work on all the variants.

• 1:14:57

And we wanted it to work when it's a small little sapling or a mature tree.

• 1:15:00

So yeah, just figuring all that out and all the different permutations of it was interesting.

• 1:15:07

It's interesting.

• 1:15:08

And also, not only that, but when you think about kind of showcasing those different stages

• 1:15:14

of life for a particular asset, that obviously creates an additional amount of work on the

• 1:15:18

asset side, right?

• 1:15:20

To create those particular stages of that mesh's lifespan, right?

• 1:15:24

Yes, yeah, it does.

• 1:15:26

Yeah, I think that kind of like in a forest, like one thing that was really important for

• 1:15:32

the environment team was kind of showing not just one kind of monolithic tree, but having

• 1:15:37

different kind of varieties.

• 1:15:38

So you can see that it's just like a living forest that like grows and has different stages

• 1:15:42

of life.

• 1:15:43

And it definitely is a lot of work.

• 1:15:46

Because now you're not just making the tree at the adult stage, you're making it at the

• 1:15:50

sapling, you're making it at the other.

• 1:15:52

And then talk to me a little bit about kind of how we achieve that scaling between these

• 1:15:57

different stages.

• 1:15:58

I think the first thing we wanted to achieve is to make sure that environment artists can

• 1:16:03

place them at the painted stage so that it sets up the general environment.

• 1:16:10

And then creating multiple states that it iterates over efficiently.

• 1:16:14

Once you can chop down like adult stage and goes, for example, to empty, it has to make

• 1:16:19

sure it replicates to every other player.

• 1:16:22

And then it transitioned into a sapling stage, into young stage.

• 1:16:26

And all the data needs to make sure it propagates to every client that sees it.

• 1:16:30

And make sure that also the bandwidth is not too large.

• 1:16:34

Because we want to, you know, keep the network traffic a little cheaper.

• 1:16:38

Exactly.

• 1:16:39

We don't want you to run through the forest in like 400 megabytes.

• 1:16:42

Oh my God.

• 1:16:44

Exactly.

• 1:16:45

Corey, obviously, you know, design has some significant intents when it comes to the variety

• 1:16:50

of the types of gatherables you have access to.

• 1:16:54

And as many of our players know, the professions that relate to these particular gatherables

• 1:17:00

and what you can do with them are also expansive.

• 1:17:03

How do you guys on design go about kind of architecting what that pyramid, so to speak,

• 1:17:09

of gatherables are within the world?

• 1:17:11

It is the base of the economy, right?

• 1:17:13

So all the processing professions and crafting professions kind of start with what's gathered

• 1:17:18

from the world.

• 1:17:19

And we start by like determining what needs to be fulfilled.

• 1:17:25

So players need armor and consumables and weapons.

• 1:17:28

So each one of those things sort of like fits in their lane.

• 1:17:31

And we need to define what things should exist in the world so that we can make those, right?

• 1:17:35

So that was kind of the first step.

• 1:17:38

Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:17:39

Now, obviously, it's interesting to see when you go up to a particular rock and you mine

• 1:17:45

it.

• 1:17:46

It takes obviously some amount of time that it takes to gather that particular resource.

• 1:17:53

What types of profession-related progression can influence that time that's spent?

• 1:17:59

But also, and we've talked a little bit about this in the past, there's an element of prospecting

• 1:18:05

that occurs.

• 1:18:07

Talk to me a little bit about that and how it interacts with the system.

• 1:18:09

Yeah, so we definitely want progression, right?

• 1:18:12

Like the more time you spend mining and the more effort you put into understanding how

• 1:18:16

mining works in Ashes, along with other gathering professions, we want you to get better at

• 1:18:21

it.

• 1:18:22

And there's different ways, right?

• 1:18:23

You can get gear, you can progress in the profession, and like you said, get faster

• 1:18:27

and maybe find better stuff.

• 1:18:29

And one of the ways to be able to find better stuff is through surveying.

• 1:18:32

And surveying is a way of kind of scanning the area, narrowing down what you're looking

• 1:18:36

for.

• 1:18:37

You know, maybe there's one recipe for a golden sword that you're trying to fill for your

• 1:18:41

friend and he wants it to be of a certain level and certain power.

• 1:18:45

And so you need this specific gold ore.

• 1:18:48

So you're not looking around for any gold, you want the specific gold.

• 1:18:51

So we want to give players the tools to be able to kind of find what they're looking

• 1:18:55

for.

• 1:18:56

And that'll be another thing that they can get better at and work with others to increase

• 1:19:00

their productivity.

• 1:19:01

Absolutely.

• 1:19:02

And with having such an expansive list of gatherables that are available, walk us through

• 1:19:07

a little bit of what that pipeline looks like.

• 1:19:09

I mean, what does it take to actually make a specific type of tree or a specific plant?

• 1:19:14

How does that process begin?

• 1:19:15

Tell us a little bit about that.

• 1:19:16

I think kind of the first step in any type of kind of asset creation like that would

• 1:19:21

be kind of gathering like a reference board, kind of finding out what sort of like real

• 1:19:26

life things we want to draw off of to make sure that's just kind of grounded.

• 1:19:30

And then also kind of deciding sort of what kind of like a mood we want to elicit, you

• 1:19:33

know, like, is it going to be a spooky tree?

• 1:19:35

Is it going to be more like, oh, like, is it going to be like a little bit more like

• 1:19:39

it's going to be magical, you know, if you feel like awe and kind of establishing that

• 1:19:42

so we kind of know what to go into the process.

• 1:19:45

The identity of the asset.

• 1:19:46

Exactly.

• 1:19:47

Yeah.

• 1:19:48

Yeah, get that like, get that mood.

• 1:19:49

And yeah, after that is kind of established, we would go into a program called SpeedTree

• 1:19:55

Normally, which kind of allows us artists to set up kind of these like, almost little

• 1:20:00

logic systems, you know, like, we want trees with like branches that are approximately

• 1:20:04

the size, you know, and kind of randomize that so it has that kind of organic element

• 1:20:09

that just, you know, kind of the human brain can't quite can't quite do as well.

• 1:20:13

But yeah, so after we have that, and we have all our geo done, we would then import into

• 1:20:18

Unreal where we would set up all of our like wind data and all of our seasonal technology.

• 1:20:23

Yeah.

• 1:20:24

And there's a lot that goes into that, right?

• 1:20:25

Because when we talked about this in an earlier segment about seasons and how that impacts

• 1:20:30

kind of all the assets that are within the world, because they all have to not just have

• 1:20:33

stages of growth when they've been gathered, but they also need to reflect the season as

• 1:20:39

well.

• 1:20:40

So that tree might lose leaves, right?

• 1:20:42

Or that plant might not even be available within a particular season.

• 1:20:46

And that's something that ties into on the engineering side, which is something you have

• 1:20:51

to take into account on the spawners, right?

• 1:20:54

And how you're kind of bringing that up.

• 1:20:55

How does that work?

• 1:20:56

Well, we just need to hook we basically hook into the seasonal tech.

• 1:21:01

And we query our service to figure out, okay, is this a winter?

• 1:21:05

Is this spring?

• 1:21:06

Is this summer?

• 1:21:08

And when the tree transitions to state to another, we check, okay, is this supposed

• 1:21:13

to happen during winter?

• 1:21:14

Is this supposed to happen during spring?

• 1:21:16

What kind of yield it's supposed to maybe give, right?

• 1:21:18

And that manager doesn't just take into account necessarily all that information as well,

• 1:21:23

but it also takes into account another system that we talked a little bit about, which is

• 1:21:27

land management.

• 1:21:28

And that can also affect kind of spawn rate, frequency, density within a particular area,

• 1:21:35

length and longevity of time to promote to different stages.

• 1:21:38

Tell me a little bit about your expectations for land management as it affects things like

• 1:21:43

gathering and crafting as a whole.

• 1:21:45

Yeah, my expectations are that it creates cool entry points for content.

• 1:21:50

You know, players have different expectations of the things that they want to achieve for

• 1:21:54

themselves and they extend that out to groups like their guilds or their node and whatever,

• 1:21:59

right?

• 1:22:00

So, you know, you might not want to chop down every single tree outside of your node because

• 1:22:04

you like using those trees for harvesting the fruit, right?

• 1:22:07

And if another group of players wants to cut them down because they want wood before a

• 1:22:11

siege, right?

• 1:22:12

Like those are conflicts that players will need to work out and interact with each other

• 1:22:16

to solve, right?

• 1:22:17

And then we can hook up into content that we create ourselves, not necessarily player

• 1:22:22

to player where maybe you cut down all the trees and you piss off a tree ant.

• 1:22:25

It's a predicate, right?

• 1:22:27

Exactly.

• 1:22:28

So that's why we think that land management is so interesting because it gives us a way

• 1:22:31

to hook into all these different content points and do cool stuff.

• 1:22:35

And so much in the world of Vera is built around this idea of players committed action

• 1:22:41

and the action has a response from the system or from other players potentially, right?

• 1:22:46

And as we're talking about how land management is just another value that can represent some

• 1:22:52

predicate system in that event or in allowing a policy, perhaps you're a more industrious

• 1:22:57

node if you constantly keep the land management at a low value, right?

• 1:23:02

All of those things are just giving the tools that we get to implement around either from

• 1:23:06

a narrative perspective or from a systemic one.

• 1:23:09

And that I think creates a very dynamic atmosphere that not a lot of players are accustomed to

• 1:23:14

in the games that we play, which offer things like gathering.

• 1:23:18

You know, typically it's a very kind of binary system, I do a thing, I get a thing.

• 1:23:23

But here I do a thing and there's a whole host of stuff that can happen as a response.

• 1:23:27

Exactly.

• 1:23:28

Yeah, the non-binary part of it is very important because it's not always this action equals

• 1:23:34

bad, right?

• 1:23:35

Right.

• 1:23:36

It is a whole slew of options of things that can happen.

• 1:23:39

So even if, you know, you think that cutting down all of the trees is going to piss off

• 1:23:43

the tree ant, there might be a whole slew of positive things that happen, you know,

• 1:23:48

after you defeat the tree ant or when the tree ant spawns and becomes someone that you

• 1:23:53

can interact with in the world.

• 1:23:54

So it's not always black and white, whether an action is good or bad, which I think is

• 1:23:58

very interesting.

• 1:23:59

It is very interesting.

• 1:24:00

And for example, that tree ant, many years ago, I think circa 2018, we showed a big tree

• 1:24:09

ant model that Keith worked on.

• 1:24:11

Remember that guy?

• 1:24:12

Yeah.

• 1:24:13

I don't know.

• 1:24:14

Maybe we'll see him if people chop down a little too many trees.

• 1:24:17

That might be interesting.

• 1:24:19

So obviously you're all MMO gamers.

• 1:24:20

We've been talking with a lot of MMO gamers here at the studio.

• 1:24:23

Many of us are MMO gamers.

• 1:24:25

What is the profession you're looking most forward to?

• 1:24:28

Go ahead.

• 1:24:30

Oh yeah.

• 1:24:31

What type of thing do you like to do from a crafting artisan perspective?

• 1:24:37

Oh, I think my personal favorite would be kind of anything in line with like the, like

• 1:24:44

harvesting, gathering potions.

• 1:24:46

Oh, alchemist.

• 1:24:47

Okay.

• 1:24:48

Very nice.

• 1:24:49

You like getting the perfect ingredients to make some type of potion that's going to come

• 1:24:53

in handy during some engagement.

• 1:24:55

That's awesome.

• 1:24:56

I also love alchemy by the way.

• 1:24:59

Don't tell anybody that.

• 1:25:02

What about you Alec?

• 1:25:03

For me, probably it would be whichever corner is the market.

• 1:25:06

Oh, there you go.

• 1:25:07

Opportunist.

• 1:25:08

You're an economist.

• 1:25:09

I'm an opportunist.

• 1:25:10

There you go.

• 1:25:11

So whatever is most worthwhile.

• 1:25:12

Exactly.

• 1:25:13

Especially with our node system, a lot of nodes going to need a lot of materials, resources.

• 1:25:18

We're going to have to, yeah, it's just, you know.

• 1:25:21

And that actually brings up a really good point because the way that the environment

• 1:25:27

is constructed, a lot of these gatherables and ergo the craftable components of those

• 1:25:34

gatherables are determined by location.

• 1:25:38

And so you're not just creating one giant economy, you're also creating local economies

• 1:25:44

as well, which relate to the transition of those goods across the world, which can make

• 1:25:48

it more opportunistic with some danger or risk involved.

• 1:25:51

Yeah.

• 1:25:52

That's super interesting.

• 1:25:53

I like that.

• 1:25:54

I'm kind of there too.

• 1:25:55

What about you Cory?

• 1:25:56

For me, it'd be really hard to choose just one.

• 1:25:58

I love fishing.

• 1:26:00

I'll try fishing in every game no matter what.

• 1:26:02

I really like crafting of equipment, whether that's like armor or weapons.

• 1:26:06

There's something special to me about outfitting yourself or another person for an adventure

• 1:26:11

that they're going on.

• 1:26:13

You have that interaction of like, what do you need?

• 1:26:14

Yeah, I can make that for you.

• 1:26:16

There's initial investment and they take that thing with them and they may trade it and

• 1:26:20

sell it and that item specifically has a story, right?

• 1:26:23

It's not the same as consumables where you're like, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:26:27

You use like a hundred of them a day.

• 1:26:29

And then engineering is really interesting to me.

• 1:26:31

I like little gadgets.

• 1:26:32

Those usually end up being the things that break some of the rules and you get to do

• 1:26:36

special funny things.

• 1:26:37

So engineering is always like very, very interesting.

• 1:26:41

Very interesting.

• 1:26:42

You know, it actually brings up something else that I was just thinking about, which

• 1:26:48

is essentially that you're working on something with engineering regarding kind of a gameplay

• 1:26:55

layer around crafting itself, right?

• 1:26:59

Talk to me a little bit about what that is.

• 1:27:01

So yeah, we're trying to put together kind of a more haptic or rooted in the world.

• 1:27:06

I guess the right word is like a diegetic experience for making weapons.

• 1:27:11

You know, oftentimes in other games or other MMOs I've played, there's a lot on the front

• 1:27:17

end of like, you get stuff and you have the stuff and then you push a button and the item

• 1:27:22

comes out.

• 1:27:23

Right, the execution is just a button.

• 1:27:24

Yeah, and all of the, there is like skill and some gameplay to that portion, right?

• 1:27:31

And I think that that will also be great in Ashes where, you know, I have to acquire all

• 1:27:34

the things and there's risk and there's trade.

• 1:27:36

But I also think that it's interesting to have skill involved in the actual crafting.

• 1:27:42

So what we're trying to put together is a way to make weapons where it feels like you're

• 1:27:47

actually making the thing.

• 1:27:49

And how you do in making the weapon results in what the stats of the weapon are going

• 1:27:54

to be.

• 1:27:55

Very cool.

• 1:27:56

So that's what we're working on.

• 1:27:57

And that's something that I think players are going to have an opportunity next year

• 1:28:01

to kind of take a look at.

• 1:28:02

And we're going to have an opportunity to collect good feedback from you around whether

• 1:28:06

or not you like that element of gameplay layer associated with the crafting profession, right?

• 1:28:13

I think that's going to be super cool.

• 1:28:15

Well guys, I want to thank you for having this conversation with me and our audience,

• 1:28:19

of course.

• 1:28:20

They're very grateful for your contributions to making Ashes of Creation a reality.

• 1:28:24

And you guys are doing a phenomenal job.

• 1:28:26

So thank you very well done.

• 1:28:27

We are going to be moving on next to a little video that showcases this last year with our

Year-in-Review video

• 1:28:34

studio and the project.

• 1:28:42

Building games is difficult.

• 1:28:43

That being said, we built an amazing team at Intrepid.

• 1:28:47

And it feels very much like a family.

• 1:28:49

So getting up each day and going into the office and working with the colleagues at

• 1:28:57

Intrepid is a delight.

• 1:29:24

What a year it has been.

• 1:29:27

The team has been hard at work.

• 1:29:29

You've seen the progress of Ashes of Creation over the last four or five years.

• 1:29:34

And you've seen where we've come from in that time to our Alpha One presentation.

• 1:29:38

And you can see how things develop.

• 1:29:43

Super excited with the character creator.

• 1:29:45

And I have very rarely ever encountered a character creator, even at this state, that

• 1:29:51

is as capable as what our team has been able to develop.

• 1:29:57

Every day that passes and I'm watching the tech continue to get refined and the environments

• 1:30:04

continue to get these passes.

• 1:30:06

And I'm just talking to the team and like, so good.

• 1:30:13

The new world map in all its 1200 square kilometer glory.

• 1:30:33

I love what the new skybox is doing.

• 1:30:36

I mean, it's just visually great.

• 1:30:45

I am so happy to see the excitement from the MMORPG community at large.

• 1:30:51

Like that looks crazy good.

• 1:30:56

That is just oh my god.

• 1:30:58

Like whenever people are talking about how they want fantasy games, this is what they're

• 1:31:03

thinking.

• 1:31:05

It grows into a horse.

• 1:31:06

I didn't know that.

• 1:31:09

This game looks amazing.

• 1:31:16

Way too good.

• 1:31:17

Ashes of creation.

• 1:31:18

It will be the most ambitious fantasy MMORPG ever attempted.

• 1:31:23

No, no.

• 1:31:24

It looks good.

• 1:31:25

It does look good.

• 1:31:26

Grab yourself a...

• 1:31:27

The team behind Ashes of Creation are some of the most talented developers.

• 1:31:42

What we're building in Ashes of Creation is the ultimate desire of a true MMORPG Ashes

• 1:32:05

team.

Outro

• 1:32:12

Thank you everyone so much for joining us.

• 1:32:14

That's going to be a wrap for us for our December livestream update.

• 1:32:17

We hope that you enjoyed it and loved getting to know our developers.

• 1:32:20

That was so much fun chatting with everyone.

• 1:32:23

They're so sweet.

• 1:32:24

Everyone's amazing and you can just see the vibe is just so...

• 1:32:27

Everyone's just passionate and loves what they do and that's kind of like the best part

• 1:32:30

of the game.

• 1:32:31

Super talented.

• 1:32:32

I know.

• 1:32:33

Just a great team.

• 1:32:34

Absolutely.

• 1:32:35

Of course, if you have feedback for us, head on over to our forums, forums.ashesofcreation.com.

• 1:32:39

We love hearing from you guys.

• 1:32:40

We interact with you always.

• 1:32:42

We're sending reports to our developers so they can continue to make sure that we're

• 1:32:45

on the same page as we move forward in creating the world of Verra.

• 1:32:48

Those reports are super important.

• 1:32:51

Really they are.

• 1:32:52

The community does such a great job of picking out all the tidbits of information from the

• 1:32:56

players on the forums, on Twitter, on Reddit, everywhere.

• 1:32:59

They read everything.

• 1:33:00

They compile it in a huge report and there's an hour that we kind of sit down with the

• 1:33:04

developments of particular features and or systems and kind of hear from the community

• 1:33:10

team all the thoughts that you guys give about these particular subjects.

• 1:33:13

So it's very important.

• 1:33:14

Make sure you guys go and give commentary on stuff.

• 1:33:17

And most often the thing is, wow, that's already stuff we're already planning and we're already

• 1:33:20

thinking of.

• 1:33:21

So I think that's the validation that we're all on the same page.

• 1:33:24

So thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:33:26

And of course you can follow us in all places at Ashes of Creation.

• 1:33:29

We are constantly posting and giving you guys updates on a daily basis and interacting with

• 1:33:33

you and we love all your fan art.

• 1:33:35

So please keep sending them back to us.

• 1:33:38

So good.

• 1:33:39

2022 isn't just the last year.

• 1:33:42

This is going to say like it's really cool to just look back at what we accomplished

• 1:33:45

this year in 2022 as a team.

• 1:33:47

The growth of the studio has been huge, but it's not done yet.

• 1:33:50

We're still going.

• 1:33:51

We're going strong into 2023.

• 1:33:53

So keep that in mind.

• 1:33:54

You guys check out our page and come join our family and direct others, people out there,

• 1:34:00

your favorite developers, stuff that you've seen.

• 1:34:03

Make sure to go out on Twitter and share the careers opportunities that that interrupted

• 1:34:07

because 20th is going to be a huge year.

• 1:34:09

Oh my gosh.

• 1:34:10

Yeah.

• 1:34:11

I had done a big thing for Steven to put together a whole like spreadsheet.

• 1:34:13

So we've got a lot to come.

• 1:34:17

It looks super good.

• 1:34:18

And guys, you haven't seen anything yet.

• 1:34:21

2023 is going to be an unbelievable year for the studio, for the project.

• 1:34:25

We have so much to show you.

• 1:34:26

I know Margaret is just chomping at the bits to get in there and get all this stuff and

• 1:34:31

share with you guys.

• 1:34:33

And you know, honestly, I just want to comment on the fact that this development that we

• 1:34:37

have, this rapport that we've built with you guys as a community and the safety we feel

• 1:34:42

in sharing works in progress with you, sharing the development along its lifespan of development

• 1:34:48

with each of you out there is very important and near and dear to our hearts.

• 1:34:52

So keep tuning in in 2023.

• 1:34:55

Keep commenting, give us your feedback, give us your thoughts, give us the experiences

• 1:34:58

that you guys have had in the past because it makes the potential for Ashes of Creation

• 1:35:03

to be such that much more of a great game when you guys are participating in it.

• 1:35:07

And that's why we do these things.

• 1:35:08

That's why we invite you in.

• 1:35:10

We show you what we're working on on a monthly basis because we want you guys to give us

• 1:35:14

your feedback.

• 1:35:16

And so we cannot thank you all enough for being a part of that in 2022.

• 1:35:20

And 2023 is going to be an awesome year and we will see you in January next month.

• 1:35:26

Bye guys.

• 00:00

Welcome and salutations to you all for our glorious development update for December.

• 00:16

We're coming to you live from our studio.

• 00:19

Obviously, I'm here today with some new faces.

• 00:24

Well, not really.

• 00:25

You've seen Langford here before.

• 00:27

We had him on during, actually it was your anniversary.

• 00:29

It was.

• 00:30

It was in February of this last year.

• 00:33

He's our executive producer and of course with me as always, Steven Tariff, our one

• 00:37

and only creative director.

• 00:38

Hello.

• 00:39

And I'm Margaret Brown, your Community Marketing Lead.

• 00:44

This is different.

• 00:45

It's different, right?

• 00:46

Actually, when was the last time that we did a stream in person?

• 00:50

It was in our old office.

• 00:52

Yeah, that was like almost two years ago or something.

• 00:54

A little over actually.

• 00:56

It's crazy to see how much we've grown as a company and I mean, this is the perfect

• 01:00

segue of what this stream is about too, is that you've just-

• 01:06

It's been a crazy year of growth.

• 01:08

Not even just a year.

• 01:09

During the pandemic, we grew an immense amount.

• 01:11

Yeah, but this year especially though has been pretty considerable as well.

• 01:16

We talked a lot about showing up at the studio and giving people a peek inside.

• 01:21

You guys saw some old, those of you who've been following since like circa 2018, 2019,

• 01:26

you saw- Steven walking around with his phone.

• 01:27

With my phone kind of doing, and now this is a little bit different, higher production

• 01:32

quality, but of course- We're still keeping the casual vibes.

• 01:35

Yeah, and the whole spirit of this is to invite you guys in, let you take a look under the

• 01:39

hood, meet some of the developers, and actually it's been pretty fun to do some of these interviews.

• 01:44

Yeah, Steven's already done one earlier, so we're-

• 01:47

Yeah.

• 01:48

These are a little pre-recorded obviously so that we can make it before, but we're trying

• 01:50

not to cut as- We didn't cut as much as possible.

• 01:54

Right.

• 01:55

So we're very much just trying to have pre-flowing conversations, which is really fun.

• 01:58

And I think these types of things are really good actually because obviously we do our

• 02:02

monthly updates.

• 02:03

Yeah.

• 02:04

But not everybody has an opportunity to kind of watch each month what's happening and what

• 02:08

those updates are, and this is a great way at the end of the year to kind of concisely

• 02:12

bring in what's happened and give people a one segment kind of look at all that's transpired

• 02:18

over the last 12 months.

• 02:19

Yeah.

• 02:20

So when you get a little glimpse into areas in our studio, so you can kind of see that,

• 02:25

and once we do have all of our cool murals up and our art, we will definitely do a proper

• 02:29

studio tour.

• 02:30

We just want to make sure that, we'll kind of give you a glimpse early on, and I know

• 02:34

those of you who are Kickstarters, who you're going to get a real life tour-

• 02:38

Ooh, that's right.

• 02:39

In person, yeah.

• 02:40

That, we want to make sure that it's really fun for you all, so that's probably going

• 02:42

to be nearer to closer for a long time.

• 02:45

Yeah, for sure.

• 02:46

Right.

• 02:47

So that's the business of this year, but honestly on the production side, you know-

• 02:52

Holy cow.

• 02:53

Your team has grown immensely.

• 02:54

Well, it did.

• 02:55

That's very true.

• 02:56

Yeah.

• 02:57

It doubled in size.

• 02:58

It did.

• 02:59

It did.

• 03:00

It doubled in size, and it's like super duper cool to have all these people like actually

• 03:02

supporting the team.

• 03:03

You know, like we talked about this a long time ago when we were moving from like a small

• 03:06

company to like a bigger company, and we were like, we're going to need a lot of support,

• 03:10

and we're kind of there now.

• 03:11

I mean, we've still got a long ways to go with a lot of growth still to come, but it's

• 03:15

super exciting.

• 03:16

I think it's been really cool to kind of watch quarter after quarter this year as we're doing

• 03:20

the production strategy meetings and going over the milestone schedules, just seeing,

• 03:24

oh, new face, new face, new face, new face, you know, keeps on going.

• 03:28

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

• 03:29

And we talked about annual reviews last month, how we were moving into wrapping those up,

• 03:35

and you guys have like way more people that you have to do reviews for.

• 03:37

Oh my gosh.

• 03:38

For me, my team is a little smaller, but you know, we also are supporting the development

• 03:42

team in order, like we're different people.

• 03:44

Like the people who are talking to you on, you know, like Twitter and hanging out with

• 03:49

you on Discord, we're a whole other team.

• 03:52

So when we get comments that are like, why are you talking to me and not developing the

• 03:57

game?

• 03:58

These guys are hardcore working super every day, really hard and passionately, as you're

• 04:03

going to see when you meet some of the developers.

• 04:05

Oh, and our leads team has grown too.

• 04:07

Oh, it's significantly, yeah.

• 04:08

We did some leadership training too.

• 04:10

Yeah, we did.

• 04:11

That was fun.

• 04:12

It was incredible.

• 04:13

We had a few, I think we did like almost six days between the two different groups of those

• 04:18

leadership meetings.

• 04:20

And they were a lot of fun just being holed up in a room for like 10 straight hours each

• 04:25

day.

• 04:26

Well, it made us realize like where we're lacking things, where we need to work towards

• 04:30

and things of that sort.

• 04:31

And sometimes you need that reflection.

• 04:33

And for people who haven't been leaders and leadership roles before, it also helps you

• 04:38

realize like how to talk to people or how to-

• 04:40

But you know, my most important takeaway I think from those particular leadership meetings

• 04:44

this year was just the level of alignment that existed already between us and the leads

• 04:50

and the development.

• 04:51

It was so cool.

• 04:52

She said to us that like the biggest problem that most other companies have is the camaraderie

• 04:56

and like sharing the same vision.

• 04:58

And she's like, that's the one thing you guys don't like have a problem with.

• 05:01

That was the thing.

• 05:02

It was so cool to see her come in and then go like, wow, you guys already got this.

• 05:05

Like this is crazy.

• 05:06

Like how connected you guys already are.

• 05:08

I do tons of these.

• 05:10

And then she went off on some of the ones that she's done and it was like, oh my gosh,

• 05:15

you guys are gelling so much better than all those other places.

• 05:18

My favorite thing about that whole process actually was as we were going through each

• 05:21

categories and we were filling out like scaling one through 10 numerical values of like those

• 05:27

particular things.

• 05:28

And we put all of our stickies up on each of the categories like, whoa, these are all

• 05:32

really close to each other.

• 05:33

That's so true.

• 05:34

Because that means we all see where our problems are and we're all on the same page.

• 05:38

Absolutely.

• 05:39

Which was really, I would agree with you.

• 05:40

That's pretty neat.

• 05:41

It was really good.

• 05:42

You know, it's really cool though.

• 05:43

The whole point of this last month of the year is that we get to kind of look back on

• 05:47

everything that we've accomplished, on all the things that we have plans for the future

• 05:51

and just reflect on kind of the course of the studio over the last year.

• 05:55

Yeah.

• 05:56

It's really a great opportunity for us to kind of get that back looking perspective.

• 06:01

Absolutely.

• 06:02

Yeah.

• 06:03

On our front, like my teams are looking at like the data from social media, what things

• 06:06

went well, what things didn't.

• 06:08

How can we engage with you all in a better way?

• 06:10

And obviously you've seen us continually progressing over that over the years.

• 06:14

I mean, even the way we do our live streams has changed and like next year we plan to

• 06:18

make more changes.

• 06:19

So we're definitely keeping an eye out on like the things that you guys say to us, how

• 06:23

you interact with us.

• 06:25

And obviously on the development front, continually progressing and making sure that we are just

• 06:29

being more efficient with our production.

• 06:30

Yeah.

• 06:31

And of course, you know, we're all watching kind of coverage for the game from our awesome

• 06:36

content creators out there who constantly kind of, you know, review what the live stream

• 06:42

updates are and everything for the game for our audience.

• 06:46

And I think one thing that can be said that all of you are going to agree with, 2022 was

• 06:52

a very different pace of year for our updates.

• 06:55

They'll get blanked.

• 06:56

I know.

• 06:57

But you guys got to see each month, you know, significant progress.

• 07:04

And of course that comes in part due to the company scaling over this last year, which

• 07:08

was very significant.

• 07:09

But in addition, just kind of as development continues, these things will ramp almost in

• 07:16

a very vertical way, right?

• 07:20

And that's something that I think people get to look forward to for 2023.

• 07:23

Of course.

• 07:24

And I think, you know, a lot of times you see games that are developed and you get to

• 07:28

see it like right when it's beta is, which their beta is like pretty much their games

• 07:31

ready to launch and they're just testing and polishing for us.

• 07:34

Like you're getting to follow us on this journey and making an MMO is a big feat.

• 07:39

It is much bigger than people think.

• 07:41

And I hope that you are getting a glimpse into like all the little details and the new

• 07:44

details that we, yeah, what it takes.

• 07:46

Cause it's a lot more effort than sometimes I think people think.

• 07:49

Right.

• 07:50

And I know that's not for everybody.

• 07:51

And that's why we always say like we make different pieces of content for different

• 07:54

types of folks.

• 07:55

Absolutely.

• 07:56

I mean this phase that we're in from a development perspective is really catered towards those

• 08:00

individuals in the community who are interested in watching the development of a game.

• 08:04

Because like you're saying, this is not just something that many players experience, but

• 08:08

also development teams don't typically think about how they're actively working on features

• 08:13

and assets that get shared live, you know, essentially.

• 08:19

I cannot think of another company that has invested this much in their community this

• 08:22

far in advance of the product.

• 08:24

Like we've been bringing this, you know, going this, going on this for three, four,

• 08:28

five years now building this community and it's amazing.

• 08:31

Yeah.

• 08:32

So amazing.

• 08:33

I was actually in a, you know, obviously if you watch our streams live, you get to see

• 08:35

all the amazing fan art that people send us.

• 08:37

And I was talking to Zach, who you're going to see in an interview following this segment.

• 08:43

And I was actually saying how crazy it is that we have all this amazing fan art.

• 08:47

And one of the walls in our hallway actually like right near us over there is where we're

• 08:51

planning to do this huge cork bar where we're going to put all the fan art.

• 08:55

So keep sending us those things.

• 08:56

We love seeing them.

• 08:58

And we've already had people making cosplay and we're definitely going to put that up

• 09:01

there.

• 09:02

So we appreciate you all so much.

• 09:04

And we hope that, you know, this to kind of segue into what you're going to be able to

• 09:07

see for the rest of today is that, you know, you're going to get a glimpse into our studio.

• 09:11

We want to set expectations that, you know, we haven't quite decorated everything yet

• 09:15

in Trepid style.

• 09:16

We are planning to do that.

• 09:17

We have some cool murals.

• 09:18

I chatted with John about like what pieces we're going to do and stuff.

• 09:21

So once those things get put up and we have a little bit more of a, you know, a vibe that

• 09:25

we want to share with you, we'll definitely give you a proper tour.

• 09:28

And we also bought some equipment, like gimbals and stuff like that.

• 09:33

You've been seeing our production quality for Extra Life increasing and obviously this.

• 09:37

So we do have plans of showing you guys those things.

• 09:40

But you know, this is going to be an opportunity for you to kind of get cozy with the developers,

• 09:45

get to know them a little bit more, not just about what the work that they work on, but

• 09:49

like them as people and kind of what they like about games.

• 09:52

And so we'll be chatting with the folks who helped with the Unreal Engine update, character

• 09:56

creator, seasons and environments, combat, gathering, and of course crafting.

• 10:01

So we hope that you enjoy that.

• 10:03

And of course we're going to look back at the year and kind of do a little year in review.

• 10:07

Bring your tissues, get ready to cry.

• 10:09

Shout out to Mike Becchio, who also made this tree.

• 10:13

Oh, I love the tree.

• 10:14

Oh my gosh.

• 10:15

The attention to detail on the little ornaments.

• 10:18

This little guy's face for the ornament is so cool.

• 10:21

Yeah, and he even made you one with him.

• 10:23

I know.

• 10:24

I love that.

• 10:25

We showed that last month.

• 10:26

This guy, the little Vec down here.

• 10:28

Yes.

• 10:29

Oh, it looks so cool.

• 10:30

They're really, really cute.

• 10:32

Maybe someday we'll have ornaments that we sell for a holiday.

• 10:35

I know.

• 10:36

That'd be great.

• 10:37

Should totally do that.

• 10:38

Yeah.

• 10:39

So before we go into everything, I do want to spotlight our comment for YouTube.

• 10:42

And of course, if you want to be spotlighted, be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube on our

• 10:47

development update and also leave a comment and you could possibly be this spotlight.

• 10:53

So today's spotlight is Eric634, and they wanted to know, I'm very curious what work

• 10:59

Intrepid is doing to capture valuable data in Alpha 2.

• 11:03

Has Intrepid built dashboards and data gathering tools?

• 11:06

And I feel like this is a great- Oh man, I was going to say, who gets this

• 11:09

one?

• 11:10

Yes.

• 11:11

I feel like we're all hyped about that.

• 11:12

Yes, of course.

• 11:13

Data.

• 11:14

Yes, well, we do.

• 11:15

We love data.

• 11:16

But here is actual work going into data and collecting and game logs and stuff that we'll

• 11:22

be using down the road a lot, especially during our Alpha to help us, to guide us to understand

• 11:28

where we're meeting our marks and beating our marks and what we want to be accomplishing

• 11:32

as far as where finding the fun is.

• 11:34

Right.

• 11:35

Yeah.

• 11:36

And of course, those come along with a complimentary set of tools that are created by our developers

• 11:40

to collect that data, not just from gameplay, because that's one important aspect of it,

• 11:45

what players are doing in the game.

• 11:47

But another part of it which completes that picture is active community engagement with

• 11:53

those players as well to tell the tale from the player's perspective, not just the actions

• 11:57

in game.

• 11:58

Right.

• 11:59

And I feel like a lot of companies and many of us probably in the community have experienced

• 12:02

this in other games, decisions get made from just data points that are numerical, right?

• 12:07

It has to be a combination.

• 12:08

But it must be a full picture that requires some investment on the company's behalf of

• 12:13

that community outreach and engagement, right?

• 12:15

Yeah.

• 12:16

And that's what I mean.

• 12:17

That's one of the reasons why I started working here is the first conversation Steven and

• 12:20

I had on the phone.

• 12:21

At Milton's, we ate lunch at Milton's.

• 12:22

Before that, I had a conversation with you on the phone because McPee was like, you need

• 12:27

to come work with us.

• 12:28

And I was like, I don't know.

• 12:29

And chatting with Steven really like, and I think back on it, that was like four years

• 12:33

ago for me.

• 12:35

But the reason why I was like, this is a place where I want to go is because you really understand

• 12:40

community.

• 12:41

You understand how important it is that we are gamers also and that we are making games

• 12:46

for gamers.

• 12:47

And I often work in the past with people who maybe aren't gamers and they didn't really

• 12:52

get the perspective of that.

• 12:53

Or we'd be making decisions because it's like, hey, this is the bottom line and we're trying

• 12:57

to hit that.

• 12:58

And if you don't hit this, you're fired.

• 12:59

And there's nothing more frustrating from a player's perspective when something changes

• 13:03

in the game and it changes for the wrong reason because some value in some cell in some Excel

• 13:08

sheet says, hey, this is the data that we scrapped from player activity.

• 13:12

Yeah.

• 13:13

And so what we're doing when we're sending reports over, we're like, hey, the numbers

• 13:16

are down for this because X and Y.

• 13:18

We give some analyzation to it.

• 13:19

And I think that sometimes that part is not read or looked into as much as it should be.

• 13:24

And it's so important to not just like look at data and make decisions, but also understand

• 13:28

like why that data is that way in the like in the grand scheme of things.

• 13:33

And with that, I think that we're going to head on over and meet up with our Unreal Engine

• 13:38

and character creator folks who Steven was interviewing.

• 13:40

So we hope that you enjoy the rest of the stream and we will see you all on the flipside.

• 13:44

I love the fireside feel to this.

• 13:46

I just got to say it.

• 13:47

It's so good.

• 13:48

We aren't going to stop that.

• 13:49

We definitely want the genuine vibe.

• 13:51

And I think hopefully you guys all feel that way through this.

• 13:54

You know, all of our streams have been that way.

• 13:56

We want even just these types of ones to feel that way too.

• 13:58

Yes.

• 13:59

We'll see you guys in a little bit.

• 14:09

Hey, guys, I am joined by three of our awesome developers.

• 14:14

We have some of our engineers here at the studio.

• 14:16

Why don't we take a second for you guys to introduce yourself?

• 14:18

Hello, I'm Clayton.

• 14:20

You might remember me from the character creator live stream.

• 14:23

Hi, I'm Mitch.

• 14:25

I've been here at Intrepid for coming up on four years now and I'm a senior engineer.

• 14:30

I'm Zach.

• 14:31

You might also recognize me from the character creator live stream.

• 14:34

And me and Zach are also engineers.

• 14:36

Yeah, we are also also gameplay engineers.

• 14:39

So that was a fun live stream.

• 14:42

But let's talk a little bit about earlier in the year.

• 14:45

Actually, it was at the end of 2021 and into January of 2022.

• 14:51

We showcased our transition over to Unreal Engine 5.

• 14:56

That was quite an endeavor.

• 14:57

Yeah.

• 14:58

We had a lot of things going on all at once.

• 15:01

Yeah, it was a lot going on.

• 15:03

There were a lot of people who participated in kind of getting the project over to Unreal

• 15:07

5.

• 15:08

Talk to me a little bit about what that process entailed.

• 15:10

Yeah, Mitch and I were at the forefront of that, especially Mitch.

• 15:15

I was helping out a lot with the version control.

• 15:18

We have a lot of additions to our custom version of Unreal Engine that allow our designers

• 15:24

to do what they need to do and allow custom features for our engineers.

• 15:28

And getting those reconciled with all of the awesome new features from Unreal Engine 5

• 15:32

was a lot of work.

• 15:33

So, right.

• 15:34

Yeah, the more custom changes that occur in the engine makes that process a bit longer

• 15:39

and a bit more intricate.

• 15:40

Right.

• 15:41

Right.

• 15:42

And when we get a new version, we have to make sure that all of the previous edits we'd

• 15:46

made to Unreal Engine still apply or still are needed.

• 15:51

So we had to step through, pardon me, basically everything we had done up to that point and

• 15:58

one by one say, do we need this?

• 16:00

Do we need something else?

• 16:02

And talk to us a little bit about kind of what benefits, I know the audience obviously

• 16:07

has had an opportunity over this course of this last year to see the benefits that Unreal

• 16:10

5 bring to the project from a visual fidelity standpoint, but also a little bit behind the

• 16:16

curtain on the tech side.

• 16:17

What type of benefits come from Unreal Engine 5?

• 16:19

Well, there's a lot finer control for one, for the map and for things like separating

• 16:26

out things into, they call it world partition, to greatly increase the performance of especially

• 16:34

the client in very cluttered areas.

• 16:37

Right.

• 16:38

The large scale additions to the engine have really helped us from the regards that we

• 16:42

were already going to have this massive world and the engine, the feasibility of it just

• 16:48

improved in that regard.

• 16:50

Yeah.

• 16:51

Like one thing that a lot of people don't consider is how you bring all of the people

• 16:54

on a massive team like this to actually work on the same thing.

• 16:59

Because previously a lot of the files would be saved in larger chunks versus now in Unreal

• 17:04

Engine 5, things are saved as individual actors.

• 17:07

So people can actually access the same level simultaneously and contribute work to the

• 17:14

same features of the project or the same parts of the content without stepping on each other's

• 17:18

toes.

• 17:19

Right.

• 17:20

And from a workflow perspective, that is very nice to have because previously you would

• 17:24

have to wait as a handoff for some particular checkout to be checked back in before you

• 17:29

could start working.

• 17:30

Yeah, we'd lock each other out as well as the environment team very often.

• 17:35

Yeah.

• 17:36

That was a big problem.

• 17:37

Yeah, the workflow side for the environment team was a big relief.

• 17:41

And then finding out that someone had something you needed to make a specific engineering

• 17:45

change and then having to wait a couple days at the worst case to be able to access the

• 17:53

file.

• 17:54

Now you can just work on the same thing.

• 17:56

It's beautiful.

• 17:57

And tell me a little bit about kind of some of the performance related benefits that come

• 18:01

on the asset side, things like Nanite or just the visual fidelity of the world with things

• 18:06

like Lumen.

• 18:07

A lot of people hear terms like Lumen and Nanite and they just see that it looks awesome,

• 18:12

but you don't realize that these are also actually just fundamental changes to how the

• 18:17

graphics are handled under the hood because with Lumen, so previously a lot of people

• 18:25

are familiar with hardware accelerated ray tracing and...

• 18:29

So many people are familiar with that.

• 18:30

Yeah, simulating...

• 18:31

And the audience especially.

• 18:32

Yeah, simulating global illumination and shadows and like...

• 18:35

Well, it was a really big thing whenever graphics card companies were coming out and saying,

• 18:40

you know, this is going to be the new amazing tech and they were showing off...

• 18:43

I remember that.

• 18:44

We tested some of that with Tristan, I think back in 2017 or 18.

• 18:48

And we had little side by sides and watched the performance.

• 18:50

They're like, oh, ray tracing on, ray tracing off.

• 18:52

And one thing that Lumen does is it allows you to actually simulate ray tracing on the

• 18:58

software side.

• 18:59

So, well, it's not simulating ray tracing.

• 19:00

They're solving the same problem with a different solution with software simulated global illumination.

• 19:05

Instead of hardware simulated.

• 19:06

So now it's more accessible to people.

• 19:09

And that's why Lumen looks so amazing.

• 19:12

And that's actually one of the reasons why in early in the year when we showcased the

• 19:16

video transitioning over to Unreal Engine 5, we used that cave area to kind of show

• 19:23

the benefits of that global illumination bouncing, cascading off of the environment.

• 19:27

Yeah, exactly.

• 19:28

And you combine that with the virtualized geometry.

• 19:31

Yeah.

• 19:32

And it's a win.

• 19:33

Yeah.

• 19:34

Not to mention, obviously, the performance gains as well.

• 19:36

Because Nanite is per pixel geometry, which is amazing.

• 19:40

Like for large worlds, a lot of the times you have massive textures that are considered

• 19:46

virtualized.

• 19:47

And this is like a very common practice previously for handling giant textures as you virtualize

• 19:51

the texture, which means that it's now streaming from disk instead of all being loaded into

• 19:55

the memory at once.

• 19:57

And Nanite now provides that for geometry so you can stream in the geometry more granularly.

• 20:01

Which is huge.

• 20:02

Yeah, it's a pixel geometry, so it's pretty incredible.

• 20:04

That's very cool.

• 20:06

Now obviously it doesn't end with Unreal Engine 5.

• 20:10

As the community is aware, starting next month we're actually going to be making the move

• 20:15

over to 5.1.

• 20:16

Yeah.

• 20:17

And talk to me a little bit about what that process is going to entail and also what types

• 20:21

of benefit it's going to bring.

• 20:22

It should be a fairly smooth process, smoother than our initial...

• 20:28

Actually we did the pre-release version of 5.0 and that was a little rough.

• 20:32

But 5.1 should be better and we're looking forward to a lot of the performance gains,

• 20:37

especially with things like they're partitioning the nav mesh along the same lines as the world

• 20:42

partition.

• 20:43

And talk to us a little bit about what partitioning nav mesh means.

• 20:46

It means that different servers and different clients will have to can load partial sets

• 20:53

of the nav mesh instead of the whole nav mesh.

• 20:56

So it's a lot less memory.

• 20:58

And the nav mesh is essentially for people who don't know, that is how NPCs path around

• 21:03

the world eventually.

• 21:04

Correct.

• 21:05

And that's how they know where collision is and what they can move around and how they

• 21:08

get to a target location.

• 21:09

Exactly.

• 21:10

Don't walk through the tree, walk around it.

• 21:11

Right.

• 21:12

Absolutely.

• 21:13

And talk to me a little bit about the...

• 21:15

I know artists are very excited about 5.1.

• 21:17

Why is that?

• 21:18

Well, a lot of the features that were still in a beta form for the engine are now coming

• 21:24

online for as like more performant versions or more reliable versions.

• 21:29

So like the entire studio will be able to move over to DirectX 12 for our primary graphics

• 21:35

API, which that's going to save the artist a lot of headache because a lot of the time

• 21:40

somebody will be like, hey, this looks bad or like I'm getting these weird glitches on

• 21:43

the textures or I'm crashing.

• 21:45

And now, you know, a lot of it's just coming into maturity with 5.1.

• 21:49

And they're also incorporating Nanite as part, as I understand it, with the foliage actors

• 21:54

as well.

• 21:55

Yeah.

• 21:56

Yeah.

• 21:57

There's some talk of that.

• 21:58

Yeah.

• 21:59

Yeah.

• 22:00

Cool.

• 22:01

I know TechArt's a little excited about that.

• 22:02

Yeah.

• 22:03

Yeah.

• 22:04

They've been waiting for it for a long time.

• 22:05

Yeah.

• 22:06

Yeah.

• 22:07

I remember they were talking to me about it almost six months ago, I think.

• 22:10

Yeah.

• 22:11

Awesome.

• 22:12

So after we showcased our move to Unreal 5 earlier this year, we had a stream about

• 22:17

our character creator.

• 22:19

And this was something that for a long time we had been talking about kind of our goals

• 22:25

since 2017.

• 22:26

You know, what are some of the character creators that we've seen that we've loved in other

• 22:31

games?

• 22:32

Talk to me a little bit about your experience as a gamer first.

• 22:36

What are some of the things that you look for in a character creator and why you were

• 22:39

excited to bring something a little bit that level and beyond potentially with ours?

• 22:43

For me, it's the freedom of expression to make the character that you want to make.

• 22:49

Without the limitations that sometimes seem kind of arbitrary that developers put in.

• 22:55

I really enjoyed Baldur's Gate character creator.

• 22:57

I thought that was a lovely one that really made me feel like I was in a fantasy realm

• 23:05

crafting my own character.

• 23:06

As well from the, I guess, purely tech side of Black Desert Online, I really enjoyed the

• 23:13

more of the tactile, click and drag, the customized character.

• 23:18

The direct manipulation.

• 23:19

Exactly.

• 23:20

Yeah.

• 23:21

For me, it's usually, can I be green?

• 23:25

Can he be green?

• 23:26

Yeah.

• 23:27

Oh, it's like a lizard folk or an orc?

• 23:30

I'm just kidding.

• 23:31

All of the above.

• 23:32

All of the above.

• 23:33

You know, actually on that note, that's a great segue into one of my favorite character

• 23:38

creator stories, which was actually Oblivion back in, I think it was 2006, Elder Scrolls.

• 23:44

It wasn't like an amazing character creator, but they had a lot of options and you were

• 23:47

able to sort of manipulate it in a way that you could push the limits by dragging one

• 23:52

slider back and one slider the other way.

• 23:54

I would always make my person red or green just for fun.

• 24:00

Of course, we don't allow for that in our character creator.

• 24:02

We talk about only allowing positive results or adding constraints that you can have a

• 24:08

high degree of control while making sure that the final result is going to look good no

• 24:13

matter what.

• 24:14

Right.

• 24:15

And of course, good can be somewhat subjective.

• 24:18

Yeah, for sure.

• 24:19

But I want to make Igor.

• 24:21

Yes, exactly.

• 24:22

But whatever you see yourself as in this fantasy role-playing setting, you should be able to

• 24:28

make that in the character creator and express yourself.

• 24:30

Well, I thought the work that you guys did and that the artists did with bringing kind

• 24:36

of the first iteration of Ash's character creator to life was really phenomenal.

• 24:41

I know it got a lot of positivity and response from the community.

• 24:46

Talk to me a little bit about that process.

• 24:47

What did that entail?

• 24:50

That was a whole lot of R&D at first.

• 24:52

Yeah.

• 24:53

Just to see if it was, I guess, possible within the engine we're working in, especially like

• 24:58

what we wanted for it.

• 25:00

Yeah.

• 25:01

Because we had a lot of demands that we couldn't really point to in other games and be like,

• 25:05

let's just do that, you know?

• 25:06

Yeah.

• 25:07

And it was a bespoke functionality that was novel to Ash's.

• 25:12

And it's one thing to make it work in the character creator, and it's a completely different

• 25:17

thing to take the character that you made in the character creator and make that work

• 25:21

in game and make it performant.

• 25:24

And that's one thing that Zach played a huge role in was actually getting the assets gameplay

• 25:28

ready by threading the skeletal mesh merge process.

• 25:32

That was pretty awesome.

• 25:33

It wouldn't really be possible unless we did a lot of heavy tech in the background to make

• 25:39

it feasible.

• 25:40

Very cool.

• 25:41

And then another aspect, obviously, is the tech you guys worked on doesn't just facilitate

• 25:47

the front-facing character creator for the player, but it's also something that can be

• 25:51

utilized internally as a tool when creating NPCs, correct?

• 25:55

Yeah.

• 25:56

When we were in the ideation phase of character creator, we always thought that it'd be great

• 26:01

to have a customization suite for design so they can go in and make quest NPCs, they can

• 26:07

populate the world with their custom characters, they can go in and give life almost to each

• 26:12

individual NPC if they wanted to and really make them unique and customized.

• 26:17

Yeah.

• 26:18

Yeah.

• 26:19

And designers, of course, love having that tool available to them, right?

• 26:21

Oh, they love it.

• 26:22

Because they don't have to go and make specific requests necessarily to character on a particular

• 26:25

type of NPC.

• 26:27

They can just jump into the tool itself and create those things.

• 26:31

And of course, that technology isn't just restricted to humanoid type NPCs, but also

• 26:36

can be able to leverage across creature creators as well, potentially.

• 26:40

Is that true?

• 26:41

Well...

• 26:42

Big plans for that.

• 26:43

Yeah.

• 26:44

Yeah.

• 26:45

That one's...

• 26:46

It's still very much in the oven, but yeah, we want to leverage a lot of the technology

• 26:51

that we made for the character creator for things like animal husbandry and for populating

• 26:58

the world with unique variations of creatures as well.

• 27:02

Yeah.

• 27:03

Absolutely.

• 27:04

We're working towards that.

• 27:05

We're going to leverage that tech as much as possible.

• 27:06

Yeah.

• 27:07

Exactly.

• 27:08

Get the most out of it.

• 27:09

Yeah.

• 27:10

In creating the character creator, one of our biggest points of emphasis is while we're

• 27:12

making this is thinking about how it can be reused in other parts of the project.

• 27:16

Yeah.

• 27:17

Absolutely.

• 27:18

Because I can edit the size of my pug's eye.

• 27:22

To make them really oversized.

• 27:25

Talk to me a little bit about what...

• 27:27

We obviously talked a little bit about one of the aspects of the future uses for the

• 27:31

character creator with creatures potentially, but what are some of the other things you're

• 27:34

excited about to continue working on getting the character creator to a point where it's

• 27:40

going to be live for launch?

• 27:43

What are some of those features?

• 27:44

I know we took a lot of feedback from the community when they gave us responses during

• 27:48

the discussions thread about what they're looking for.

• 27:51

They talked a little bit about more hair options, more abilities to do tattoos, perhaps even

• 27:56

to customize those things.

• 27:57

What are some of the things you guys are excited to add?

• 28:00

Yeah.

• 28:01

So one thing that I'm really excited to work on next is the hair customization.

• 28:04

Well, a lot of the functionality for the hair customization is there, but I think that you

• 28:08

saw in the demo, it was still using sliders.

• 28:11

We really want to expand how much you can customize individually on the hair and also

• 28:16

incorporate that same mechanic of direct manipulation so that you're dragging different

• 28:21

parts of the hair or actually configuring it that way.

• 28:25

Especially with longer braids and jewelry and more of the granularity you can use to

• 28:31

really customize your character.

• 28:32

Yeah, we saw a lot of commentary about that.

• 28:35

And of course, players, as you guys understand, those might not always be available at the

• 28:40

inception of a particular character, but might be unlocked through achievements in game that

• 28:45

you can then revisit the character creator through salon services and nodes and start

• 28:50

to customize further as your character's history matures within the world.

• 28:54

Right?

• 28:55

Yeah.

• 28:56

That's one thing that I'm super excited for is the gameplay integration of the character

• 29:00

creator in real time and how we integrate different customization features and tie that

• 29:06

into your character progression.

• 29:08

I can't wait to see the different scars that I can unlock from a deadly battle.

• 29:14

Like reputation based tattoos.

• 29:16

Yeah, exactly.

• 29:17

Yeah, I've never seen that before.

• 29:20

That is cool.

• 29:21

Yeah, going into the tattoo parlor in the Dunir node and getting like a special Dunir

• 29:26

tattoo.

• 29:27

Oh my God.

• 29:28

It would be also cool as a feature if you're capable of inspecting other players, you know,

• 29:32

customization options and what they represent.

• 29:34

So if you do add the scar from the dragon fight, another person can see, ah, they have

• 29:38

a scar and it's from that dragon fight.

• 29:40

Yeah, exactly.

• 29:41

Yeah, that is super cool.

• 29:42

I love gameplay, I guess options, but we're going to give designers to be able to populate

• 29:47

the world with quests and reputation.

• 29:49

Yeah, yeah, that's super cool.

• 29:52

Very, very cool.

• 29:53

Well, awesome.

• 29:54

You know, I guess one final question that I would have for you guys is as someone who

• 30:01

takes a long time to create your character, do you generally just randomize and go or

• 30:08

do you sit there and fiddle with it?

• 30:11

I know that in an MMO setting, sometimes when you're making that character, and obviously

• 30:15

this is a service we've talked about offering is prior to launch, players will be able to

• 30:19

access the character creator and prep for that launch time because you want to get into

• 30:22

the server as quickly as possible.

• 30:23

You don't want to lose any time, right?

• 30:24

And trying to progress.

• 30:26

But do you guys like to fiddle with the character creator, spend a long time doing it, customizing

• 30:30

everything or do you just randomize and go?

• 30:33

Well, at first I do both actually.

• 30:35

Really?

• 30:36

At first I randomize them, go and I give the game, I'm super picky.

• 30:39

I give the game an hour and if I'm not captured in an hour, I get a refund.

• 30:45

A lot of people do that.

• 30:48

Then I spend two hours in the character creator making my real character.

• 30:52

Okay, so first you bet the game, then if you like it, you spend the time.

• 30:56

What about you guys?

• 30:57

Yeah, no, so normally I'll randomize to find a starting point that I like and then I'll

• 31:01

customize from there.

• 31:04

But normally I don't actually put a lot of time into the character creator.

• 31:08

Really?

• 31:09

Oh my gosh, the sacrilege.

• 31:11

I'm just kidding.

• 31:12

I spend a lot of time in character creators and if there's ever an option to mod it like

• 31:17

Skyrim, I'll add even more customization options like modded Skyrim just so I can have full

• 31:24

control and like if it's not a time gate or like I'm waiting to get into the game, if

• 31:30

I have like a single player game, I will spend a full play session.

• 31:36

I generally, if I'm starting a game, especially an MMO and I know that, I mean in the past

• 31:42

the MMOs that I've experienced, it was rare to kind of visit that character creator again

• 31:47

and get to change things.

• 31:48

So I would spend a lot of time building out the character, customizing things.

• 31:53

I don't know, I'm kind of a guppy for the role play side.

• 31:55

One of the nice things that Clayton did was he worked on a really nice randomization feature.

• 32:01

Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 32:02

Like if you're not one of those players like me that spends a lot of time in it, you can

• 32:09

just randomize through and you're going to get like amazing results every time and Clayton

• 32:15

did a really good job with just the breadth of the customization with the randomization

• 32:20

and then you can always use that to go off of it.

• 32:23

Yeah, I was having a fun time just kind of spamming that randomize button and just watching

• 32:27

the different shapes and figures and faces.

• 32:30

Just roll through the character creator, that was actually pretty cool.

• 32:33

Yeah, seeing how many different ones you could generate in a short amount of time, that's

• 32:37

neat.

• 32:38

And that's also, that's going to be at the forefront of our content designers ability

• 32:42

to populate the world with convincing good looking characters is a decent looking randomizing

• 32:47

feature.

• 32:48

Awesome.

• 32:49

Yeah, very cool.

• 32:50

Well guys, thank you for taking the time to chat with me and our audience.

• 32:53

We're going to have a fun little segment coming up next.

• 33:04

And welcome over into the environment and season side.

• 33:08

I am joined by three absolutely awesome members of the team.

• 33:12

Tristan, you want to introduce yourself?

• 33:13

I'm Tristan Snogress, I'm the lead environment artist here at Intrepid Studios.

• 33:17

Absolutely.

• 33:18

We also have Brian Ganz, lead tech artist.

• 33:21

And of course the amazing...

• 33:23

I'm Kat Nary and I am the audio lead at Intrepid.

• 33:26

Yay.

• 33:27

So we actually pulled off some fun feats this year and showcasing to the community some

• 33:32

pretty exciting stuff.

• 33:33

One of which was the seasons showcase.

• 33:37

And we did that in the Riverlands biome, is that right?

• 33:40

Correct.

• 33:41

That was the first biome that we actually implemented the actual tech that Brian and

• 33:45

Hal and James actually worked on.

• 33:47

Right.

• 33:48

And talk to me a little bit about that tech.

• 33:50

What did it entail?

• 33:52

You're just touching every single component of Unreal where a lot of things had to be

• 33:57

harmonized like the cloud, the volume cloud stuff and the particle effects for the rain

• 34:01

and the snow.

• 34:02

I think I mentioned it in the livestream for the...

• 34:05

Yeah, you did.

• 34:06

But yeah, that's...

• 34:07

There's just so many parts to it.

• 34:08

I mean, it was amazing to see.

• 34:09

Like, you know, we talked about it during, of course, the demonstration that I've never

• 34:12

personally experienced any type of tech like that in an MMORPG before where you actually

• 34:17

get to see the biome change in front of your eyes on a seasonal basis.

• 34:20

How difficult was that to achieve and how much did moving over to Unreal 5, we just

• 34:25

talked about in the previous segment, moving over to Unreal 5 help with that?

• 34:28

I think it helped with it a lot.

• 34:29

I think a lot of the cases in Unreal, the solve you're looking for is a button, button

• 34:34

press or a check block or something.

• 34:36

But there are a lot of different systems to harmonizing gameplay implications that...

• 34:42

And it's probably one of the hardest things is the planning out of how to start it so

• 34:47

that the whole approach is future proof and does everything you want it to do or might

• 34:51

want it to do.

• 34:52

Right.

• 34:53

Yeah.

• 34:54

And that, of course, has implications on the audio side because as an environment changes,

• 34:57

of course, the ambience doesn't sound the same.

• 34:59

Those things have to...

• 35:00

Those tracks have to change.

• 35:01

How was that implementing?

• 35:02

I mean, first, doing season tech is something I wanted to do for like 20 years in the game

• 35:08

industry.

• 35:09

So when I got to see what the artists were doing, I was really excited to work on this.

• 35:13

You know, you would think that there's just four seasons and so you make your four sounds

• 35:17

of summer, winter, fall, spring.

• 35:19

But we're going to go high tech and we're going to do eight variations that seamlessly

• 35:24

go through.

• 35:25

Ideally, you won't hear the changes because it'll be so seamless and they'll just kind

• 35:28

of go through.

• 35:29

Yeah.

• 35:30

It's something you don't get to see in the live streams right now because you do changes

• 35:32

in 30 seconds.

• 35:33

Right.

• 35:34

So when we do the sounds for them and as the audio team continues to grow, like right now,

• 35:38

I went out and recorded the rare rain in San Diego a couple of weeks ago.

• 35:41

Oh, so good.

• 35:42

I love listening to that.

• 35:43

So as the audio stuff gets into the game and as it grows, we'll go do more field recording.

• 35:48

You know, we try to make as much custom sounds as we can that fit the environment that we

• 35:51

see.

• 35:52

And I, of course, haven't received yet your itinerary of all the places in the world you

• 35:54

plan to travel to.

• 35:55

To collect those things.

• 35:56

Yeah.

• 35:57

I will be asking for reimbursement when I go to Fiji.

• 35:58

Yes, exactly.

• 35:59

I am more than happy to travel all over the world for you.

• 36:05

To collect the perfect references for the different types of assets.

• 36:08

Of course.

• 36:09

Yeah.

• 36:10

We can do that as well.

• 36:11

Talk to me a little bit about that.

• 36:12

So, the biomes, the animations, I know James did a lot of work on the seasonal showcase

• 36:15

for those assets.

• 36:16

How do you guys kind of derive what you're going to fill those biomes with?

• 36:20

So first, it was just trying to find some real world references that we could take as,

• 36:24

you know, inspiration.

• 36:25

Then, of course, we do get concept images derived from that, the add the fantasy flair

• 36:30

that we're going to have.

• 36:31

Right.

• 36:32

So then, you know, we want to do real world, but we're also doing high fantasy.

• 36:35

Yeah.

• 36:36

What kind of elements to it.

• 36:37

So, they chose Wales as essentially the biome for this, which is basically like where my

• 36:43

family is from.

• 36:44

Right.

• 36:45

So, I was like, all right, we're going with this.

• 36:46

I remember seeing your shots that you took while you were in Wales, and you were posting

• 36:50

them all throughout the art channels.

• 36:51

Oh, yeah.

• 36:52

And you were like, all right, this is great for this.

• 36:53

This is great for this.

• 36:54

And when we need more references, I called up my mom and was like, hey, you want to go

• 36:58

out to the garden and pick some photos?

• 36:59

I got a task for you.

• 37:00

They want to know what the ground looks like during winter.

• 37:03

It's simple.

• 37:04

I can get you that right now.

• 37:05

Do you fill out any Jira tasks for her when you ask her to do that stuff?

• 37:07

Yes, she's still asking for her money.

• 37:08

Okay.

• 37:09

We'll figure it out.

• 37:10

She's retired.

• 37:11

She's okay.

• 37:12

But yeah, so then we moved on to the desert biome after that.

• 37:15

And so, that wasn't necessarily seasonal tech implementation right there, but we had a whole

• 37:19

bunch of stuff to kind of think about how we wanted to approach seasonal tech from a

• 37:24

very different environment.

• 37:25

Right, especially like the one that's desolate as a desert.

• 37:28

Right.

• 37:29

And so, how do we make that environment change over four biomes and make it feel like unique

• 37:32

and interesting and different, but also not just do a traditional desert.

• 37:37

Yeah.

• 37:38

So, we'd like to make like the winters maybe slightly different that you might see in a

• 37:41

desert.

• 37:42

I know.

• 37:43

We talked a little bit about that.

• 37:44

And there's some cool stuff that we've done for things that might come down the line,

• 37:47

but one of the things that we wanted to do was also out here in Anza, Borrego, we get

• 37:52

the desert super blooms, which is where everything turns into like this beautiful painting of

• 37:56

color.

• 37:57

It's unbelievable.

• 37:58

Yeah, the flower blooms are just mind blowing.

• 38:00

Beautiful.

• 38:01

And there's some stuff that we have been trying to make happen that is going to probably blow

• 38:06

people's minds even more than we've already done with the riverland.

• 38:09

Absolutely.

• 38:10

And I think that people are going to be really excited to see that stuff.

• 38:13

I think just the glimpse that we got actually at the desert area, that desert biome, there's

• 38:17

already just such beauty that you did with the oasis and the tech across the rolling

• 38:23

winds over the sand dunes.

• 38:25

Talk to me a little bit about how you kind of accomplished the winds for the sand dunes.

• 38:29

There's a couple of techniques, I think.

• 38:31

A lot of times the environment artists will take a stab at what they want to do and then

• 38:35

I'll pick it up and work it and massage it in a little bit better with some of the systems

• 38:39

that are in there already.

• 38:41

Making it a little more functional than what an artist might be.

• 38:44

And performant.

• 38:45

Might perform as well.

• 38:46

But yeah, they know, they have an idea of what they want in their eye and I'm just like,

• 38:49

okay, I get it.

• 38:50

And let's kind of use that in a particle effect to do that as well.

• 38:54

Sometimes it's kind of like use a different system but in the same way that they're envisioning.

• 38:59

I try to cover all the different things Unreal can do, like the grass, the foliage, and the

• 39:04

virtual textures and everything.

• 39:05

And there's a lot of ways to do things but there's often the best way to do something.

• 39:10

And just kind of put that in there.

• 39:12

The heat distortion was done one way, let's put that in the particle system.

• 39:16

And they all kind of layer on top of each other, these different systems that you're

• 39:20

utilizing.

• 39:21

If you take one out, then the whole scene just kind of falls apart.

• 39:25

And now of course we have certain types of weather events that are of course going to

• 39:28

impact audio as well for these areas.

• 39:31

Like we talked a bit about one of the boss designs that are intended for the desert biome,

• 39:36

having this kind of whirlwind of sandstorm.

• 39:40

And when players get inside of those things, how does that kind of change audio?

• 39:43

Yeah, no, Brian's been awesome to work with because he's built a lot of systems that can

• 39:46

drive the audio dynamically.

• 39:48

So I'll go out and record various levels of sounds and then they'll procedurally change

• 39:53

in the game to really make you feel like you're in there.

• 39:56

Even the same with the trees, if you go under the trees right now with the wind, the little

• 39:59

leaves will kind of go up and down with the wind parameters that Brian's set up.

• 40:04

And it's really, really neat and really interactive.

• 40:06

And not just the winds, I noticed that as I kind of move through the game and I get

• 40:10

close to some of these particular foliage actors, I hear birds chirping or some type

• 40:15

of cue that just happens in the background.

• 40:17

The birds are super cool too because they're going to be assigned to certain trees.

• 40:21

And sometimes you'll find that really cool bird, you want to sit under it.

• 40:24

And then sometimes you'll find a bird that maybe you don't want to be near.

• 40:26

And so maybe you'll chop down that tree and take away his home or move away.

• 40:30

Oh no, that's terrible.

• 40:31

But you know, it's really cool.

• 40:32

That is actually very genius.

• 40:33

I noticed also, as we were kind of showcasing some of the ranger footage that design and

• 40:42

the combat engineers have been working on, there was that almost pollen-like fog that

• 40:48

was just throughout the level that created that almost morning dust look in that area.

• 40:53

Yeah, one of our newer artists, John Wainick, has actually been implementing all of those

• 40:57

kind of features to get...

• 40:59

That's just another atmospheric element that completely adds to the mood.

• 41:03

And those are seasonal as well, right?

• 41:04

Those are going to be tuned to specific seasons.

• 41:08

And not just seasons, also weather in general.

• 41:10

So you might get a foggy morning.

• 41:12

There's been several pretty amazing games recently that I've played that have some of

• 41:16

these elements.

• 41:17

And that really changes the vibe of when you're running around, like one day to another is

• 41:22

completely different.

• 41:23

And that's a great point.

• 41:24

Like we're all gamers.

• 41:25

We all play games in our spare time.

• 41:28

That's why we're in this industry is because we love games.

• 41:30

We like seeing the smiles on people's faces when we make something that excites them.

• 41:34

How much inspiration do you draw from the games that you play?

• 41:38

That's a tough question because there's so many different types of games that you can

• 41:41

play, obviously, and I don't really stick to one.

• 41:44

And none of them have a shortage of awe-inspiring feats that their dev teams accomplish as well.

• 41:48

And for me in particular, Red Dead Redemption is an amazing game where I could just ride

• 41:54

around and enjoy the nature all day.

• 41:57

Or the shenanigans that the horses have.

• 41:59

Yeah, all the little things.

• 42:01

But yeah, that specific game has a lot of atmospheric elements for when I'm running

• 42:05

around.

• 42:06

And not just the visual elements, but then the sound does kick in.

• 42:09

And sound to me is one of the things that really truly sells like a movie or a game.

• 42:16

Especially the music and such like that.

• 42:17

But if the audio doesn't feel right, then you know.

• 42:20

Yeah, absolutely.

• 42:21

I mean, that was something that was big for me.

• 42:24

Not just in gaming, but I find in many different forms of entertainment, especially media,

• 42:30

television, movies, like the soundtrack, the music that accompanies what's happening,

• 42:38

more often than not elicits stronger emotions from me than the visuals or the dialogue.

• 42:42

My goal for Vero Audio is you should be able to find a nice little safe place to sit down

• 42:47

and leave it on in the background as a nice ambient audio generator.

• 42:51

And you can go work on your thesis or whatever else you're working on, or just nice little

• 42:55

go to bed to it.

• 42:56

And I want you to feel like you're always in there.

• 42:59

That's what we need to do.

• 43:00

That's what I'm saying.

• 43:01

Yes, remember we used to talk about that so long ago.

• 43:02

First we'll do that.

• 43:03

We should totally throw up like a YouTube loop that people can just leave on.

• 43:07

Oh, that would be a great idea.

• 43:09

That's one way to fall asleep.

• 43:10

Yeah, absolutely.

• 43:11

So as we kind of, you know, look forward into 2023, what are some of the areas that you

• 43:18

guys have on your excited list of things to tackle, right?

• 43:23

What's the biome you're looking most forward to?

• 43:26

So the Redwood Forest is something that we're aiming to push into.

• 43:29

Oh my god.

• 43:30

We've already kind of started pushing into it slowly, but you know, just being surrounded

• 43:35

by giant massive trees that just don't seem to be making any sense of why they exist.

• 43:41

Like when you're walking through a Redwood Forest in real life, like up in Northern California,

• 43:45

it's awe-inspiring.

• 43:47

And there's a lot of cool, seasonal stuff that we can do with that.

• 43:51

So that's my...

• 43:52

Yeah, I was talking to design a little bit about group gameplay dynamics when we instituted

• 43:57

the gathering tech and having specific assets that require multiple players in order to

• 44:02

actually chop down a particular tree.

• 44:04

Yeah, I don't think you can really take down a Redwood with a simple person in their hands.

• 44:09

Ah, six swings, we're good.

• 44:11

We'll see how that plays out.

• 44:12

That's going to be an interesting feature to actually make work, because from the tech

• 44:15

side of things, I mean, I guess we'll be talking more about that later on today, but harvesting

• 44:21

tech is going to play into that.

• 44:22

Right.

• 44:23

And it's relevant, of course, to seasons, because not just the ambience and the audio

• 44:27

changes, but the assets that are available and spawn those changes well, and those have

• 44:31

actual economic implications when it comes to the world economy.

• 44:35

So yeah, that's super cool.

• 44:39

Well talk to me a little bit about kind of how you blend the work between setting up

• 44:44

these zones, these biomes for the seasonal aspects, and working with design to determine

• 44:50

which assets spawn when, how it's affected potentially by time of day, and a little bit

• 44:56

about working with design on setting up these biomes filled with different types of gatherables,

• 45:04

essentially, and how it's affected by season, right?

• 45:07

They have cycles, essentially.

• 45:09

There's going to be different types of plants, different types of foliage that you can harvest

• 45:12

during certain times of the year.

• 45:14

Brian, I guess you were probably going to be plugging that tech into all the harvestable

• 45:18

assets in the sense that you might get a certain plant in winter, but you're not going to get

• 45:21

it during the time where weather might affect that.

• 45:24

Right.

• 45:25

And we saw a little bit about that, not just with the assets, but also with the creatures

• 45:28

as well.

• 45:29

Correct.

• 45:30

Yeah.

• 45:31

And what went into making the creatures kind of change with the seasons?

• 45:35

Actually, it's not as difficult as it sounds.

• 45:37

That was probably the easiest answer.

• 45:38

Wait, don't say that.

• 45:39

It's very difficult.

• 45:40

No, I'm just kidding.

• 45:41

Very complex.

• 45:42

We can't give away the secrets.

• 45:43

Yeah, I can't give away the secrets.

• 45:44

It's probably hard for the guys at Epic to put it on the engine, but we just kind of knew

• 45:47

every material, every object has access to wind, direction, and speed, time of year,

• 45:52

time of day.

• 45:53

It's up to the artist to just kind of tap into these accessible variables and say, make

• 45:57

this color in the summer, a different color in winter.

• 46:01

It gets complicated when you start putting in more dynamics with like, we want a storm

• 46:06

in this area.

• 46:07

So we move across the world and it has gameplay implications and all the clients know if they're

• 46:12

in a storm or not.

• 46:15

To that whole process of working with designers and how to integrate what we can do and what

• 46:20

they want to do, I have to have like, here's the ambitious goal that everyone's talking

• 46:25

about, but we've got to fall back just in case.

• 46:28

I need a fallback plan.

• 46:30

A scale of achievability.

• 46:31

Push the really ambitious thing that's going to blow everyone's socks off.

• 46:37

And we usually hit the ambitious ones.

• 46:39

Yeah, somehow, some way it always works out.

• 46:41

And then of course, you have to think about all of these things from an audio perspective

• 46:45

where essentially you're layering on these different sounds and when does it become too

• 46:50

much if I've got a storm coming, I'm in combat with ten creatures, I've got players around

• 46:55

me with abilities and effects, and I've got dynamic music.

• 46:58

A great code team and we're also using audio kinetics, audio engine, both those things

• 47:03

with the code team and the audio engine will allow us to do some really cool dynamic mixing

• 47:08

that we'll get to choose what needs to be in focus.

• 47:11

And when you're in the storm, you're going to hear the storm, but if combat's coming

• 47:13

on and bigger things that need to be focused on, those are going to kind of come up while

• 47:16

the storm will go down.

• 47:17

So it's going to be all kinds of fire toys like that.

• 47:19

That's awesome.

• 47:20

That is awesome.

• 47:21

Well, with that being said, we are going to be moving over into our discussion about combat.

• 47:29

And I want to thank you guys for joining us and chatting a little bit about the seasons

• 47:33

and what it takes to actually make this stuff exist in game.

• 47:36

So awesome job guys.

• 47:38

And we will be seeing you in just a second.

• 47:48

And we are back with a fun little discussion with some of our awesome developers who are

• 47:55

involved in the development of our combat and classes and special effects, all the fun

• 48:00

stuff that makes an MMO an MMO.

• 48:04

First thing I want to ask is for you guys each to introduce yourself.

• 48:07

It was you, Jim.

• 48:08

I'm Jim.

• 48:09

I am the lead effect art.

• 48:10

Yes.

• 48:11

Trap.

• 48:12

Yep.

• 48:13

I'm Trap Thompson.

• 48:14

I'm a senior combat designer on the project.

• 48:16

Awesome.

• 48:17

Keenan.

• 48:18

I'm Keenan.

• 48:19

I'm a gameplay engineer.

• 48:20

Mostly work on combat and movement.

• 48:22

So we have shown some fun stuff this year.

• 48:25

And I think the audience of course would agree that the look at Ashes development since the

• 48:32

start of 2022 has ramped up in a very fun and engaging way for the community to kind

• 48:38

of take a look at how development works here.

• 48:40

You guys all are involved in a process of course that is very near and dear to many

• 48:44

players hearts, which is the identity of their archetypes, the abilities they have access

• 48:49

to those classes, how they interact from a role perspective with combat in general in

• 48:53

the game.

• 48:54

What are some of the inspirations?

• 48:55

What are some games that you guys have played in the past that kind of helped to influence

• 49:00

decisions that we make on Ashes?

• 49:01

Oh, you know, that's a good question because if you're playing an MMO, you're going to

• 49:07

have to think of kind of the big players out there.

• 49:09

And I got thousands of hours in World of Warcraft and that will definitely influence how I shaped

• 49:15

kind of some of the iconic imagery, the colors and shapes.

• 49:19

I think really a lot of that motivation comes back to the feedback I get from the community

• 49:24

and from the developers.

• 49:25

Like Tread is always kind of saying, Hey man, what about this shape or this size?

• 49:29

Or I'm thinking about this mechanic.

• 49:31

Yeah.

• 49:32

So I guess it's a circular, circle.

• 49:34

Absolutely.

• 49:35

I mean, all of us have been experiencing MMOs.

• 49:37

I mean, we're all MMO gamers.

• 49:38

That's part of the question that I ask in the final interview.

• 49:41

You come up with your favorite MMOs.

• 49:43

The real qualifying.

• 49:44

Yes, the qualifying question.

• 49:45

Tread, what are some MMOs or games in general that you draw inspiration from?

• 49:50

There are so many I would have to narrow that down to.

• 49:53

I'll pick an MMO since that's the most relevant.

• 49:56

And I'd say the most influential MMO on me, on just as a gamer has been Dark Age of Camelot.

• 50:03

I remember actually our interview when you asked me about my MMO experience.

• 50:07

That was the one I chose to talk about.

• 50:09

I loved it.

• 50:10

It was such a fun game.

• 50:11

Yeah.

• 50:12

Yeah.

• 50:13

That was really the game I think that really, well that and RuneScape, if you qualify RuneScape

• 50:18

as an MMO, that one as well.

• 50:20

But Dark Age was really where I think I realized the magic of an MMO and it really is what

• 50:27

got me into open world PvP and that's what really excites me about this project is bringing

• 50:31

that kind of thing back.

• 50:33

Just that really spontaneous gameplay that you run into out in the field and you never

• 50:37

know what to expect.

• 50:38

Absolutely.

• 50:39

Yeah.

• 50:40

What about you, Keenan?

• 50:41

For me, I think it's probably WoW.

• 50:45

Specifically the re-release of vanilla WoW, Classic WoW, I thought that was a phenomenal

• 50:52

experience.

• 50:53

I actually never played in vanilla.

• 50:54

Oh really?

• 50:55

So that was your first time with Classic WoW?

• 50:57

That was my first time with Classic and I feel like it brought back some of the old

• 51:01

school adventure that a lot of us have been missing.

• 51:03

That feeling back, yeah, the nostalgia.

• 51:04

Yeah, we've got a group playing right now.

• 51:06

Oh yeah?

• 51:07

Really?

• 51:08

Hopefully we'll start back up again on Old War.

• 51:10

Very cool.

• 51:12

So obviously, as our audience has kind of seen throughout the year and they're kind

• 51:17

of seeing now as we put little clips into this particular video, we've shown off a little

• 51:22

bit of the ranger, we've shown off a little bit of basic weapon attacks and melee, some

• 51:27

of the fighter skills, we've shown off the cleric most recently.

• 51:31

Tell me a little bit about the process that goes into actually making these archetypes.

• 51:36

Obviously the ability side is very important that needs to have support from engineering

• 51:40

and the effects and stuff, but what typically goes into, and we have a lot of classes to

• 51:44

make, right, and we're deep within the thralls of that process, but what does it take?

• 51:48

Yeah, I could start on that.

• 51:51

So obviously a class has to, or an archetype has to start on paper, right?

• 51:57

A lot of the time we'll go into prototyping and start building out stuff and see what's

• 52:00

fun but just about always we start on paper on a design document.

• 52:05

And we're talking about specific abilities when we start out on paper, right?

• 52:10

First we actually go about establishing the class fantasy and the identity and the role

• 52:14

within the party, right?

• 52:17

Because that really helps to inform what those abilities then are.

• 52:22

So that's usually the first step is, you know, what is this archetype?

• 52:24

What identifies it?

• 52:25

What is the role that it's trying to accomplish?

• 52:28

Once that is done then we go into what you're suggesting there where, you know, we'll go

• 52:33

and brainstorm a whole wide list of abilities and class mechanics and then once we've got

• 52:39

all those, you know, a lot of them will get the chopping block and some of them will make

• 52:43

it through, some will get iterated and, you know, kind of redesigned, reimagined.

• 52:48

And then after that step usually we go to you and we have a sort of review meeting and,

• 52:55

you know, you'll pick ones that you like, you'll pick ones you want to change.

• 52:58

That's the second chopping block.

• 52:59

The second chopping block, yeah, there you go.

• 53:02

We try and filter it on our end as much as Steven makes sure it gets done one way or

• 53:07

another.

• 53:08

And then, you know, once that's done then we jump into the prototyping, right?

• 53:13

Then it starts down the pipeline process, right?

• 53:15

Yeah, yeah.

• 53:16

And rapid prototyping is a really important step of the design process for combat because

• 53:21

we want to build and fail early or, you know, succeed early.

• 53:26

And we find the fun, we find what's not fun.

• 53:28

And we can all do that within, you know, the tools that our very talented engineers provide

• 53:33

us and we're always working to improve that stuff.

• 53:36

And the better tools we have, the better the designers can do their job.

• 53:39

And of course engineering kind of fields requests from a capability standpoint on what design

• 53:45

can actually provide a particular ability to do, right?

• 53:49

Talk to me a little bit about, you know, how you field those requests, how you incorporate

• 53:53

that as part of the ability system, all those things.

• 53:56

Well we always do feasibility on any requests that we get, but our designers are really

• 54:00

good about that and we don't usually have too many issues there.

• 54:04

Usually, yeah, I like to run wild sometimes.

• 54:09

For me as an engineer though, I think a lot of times the challenge is in, you know, they're

• 54:15

trying to get the fantasy right and the question is like, how do you make somebody who's playing

• 54:21

a game feel like they are being delivered on that fantasy?

• 54:25

So when design asks us for something, we usually play it a lot ourselves as we're making it

• 54:29

and we search for that feeling and, you know, we're all gamers so we know what it feels

• 54:33

like so we're looking for it as we build it.

• 54:35

That's one of my favorite things is I'm walking past your desk going to my office, sometimes

• 54:39

you'll just be like, hey Steven, you got two minutes.

• 54:41

And then you put me at your desk at the keyboard and you're like, how does this feel?

• 54:45

Do you feel like a ranger?

• 54:46

I know, do you feel like a ranger?

• 54:48

Does this sword slash feel good?

• 54:50

Yeah, absolutely.

• 54:51

I mean, and obviously, you know, you guys, you and Adam have had a very instrumental hand

• 54:55

as part of working with design and visual effects to kind of capture not just that role,

• 55:00

but that feeling as you described, and sometimes that incorporates working with animators to

• 55:05

get the right types of author animations for like particular weapon attacks and or abilities,

• 55:11

and the timing on those things is pivotal in creating the right feeling, right?

• 55:16

There's so many technical components to it and as is often the case with engineering,

• 55:20

it's like eliciting that right human response out of the very mathematical thing is the

• 55:26

challenging part.

• 55:27

Yeah.

• 55:28

And Jim, obviously, you know, audio and visual effects, they come in kind of near the end

• 55:32

of that pipeline where, you know, design and engineering has provided the tools to design,

• 55:38

designs iterating with authored animations, and then VFX comes in and says, how can I

• 55:43

make this look spectacular?

• 55:44

I mean, there's a tremendous amount of thought that's already been placed into this mechanic

• 55:50

or designer ability or whatever.

• 55:53

So on top of that, we're thinking about how can we push the MMO space?

• 55:57

We don't want to recreate the other games.

• 55:59

We want to make it our own game.

• 56:00

I mean, we want to push the effects to a level that you just don't see in the industry period,

• 56:05

but at the same time, we don't want to create visual effects soup.

• 56:08

So we're working on creating a visual language, something that the gamers here are playing

• 56:13

are going to understand like, hey, that's like an arcane ability or that's like a tank

• 56:18

mixed with this, you know, summoner or whatever.

• 56:20

So we have to figure out how to do all of this, not make it too muddy, but actually

• 56:24

execute in a way that looks cool, so it's really, really nice to have people like Trad

• 56:28

and our engineer team to go back and forth and be like, hey, can we connect this beam

• 56:32

here?

• 56:33

Can I parameterize it and can we expose this to the UI guys so we can ramp it up or down

• 56:37

to do stuff?

• 56:38

Yeah, and you hit on a really interesting point, which is visual effects is obviously

• 56:42

not just about creating things that are awesome, but the language that communicates in the

• 56:47

style guide of how these effects translate to particular classes from just a silhouette

• 56:52

perspective, shape language or visual fidelity and the hues and colors that are used to communicate

• 56:57

at long distances like, hey, I know what I'm going up against, especially if it's a PvP

• 57:02

scenario, or if you see your group kind of doing something, there are visual cues for

• 57:06

you to respond appropriately and synergistically from a rotations perspective.

• 57:10

And that's something I know early on, you know, we worked with each other kind of going

• 57:14

through you and the VFX team across, you know, what those shapes languages should look like

• 57:18

for particular types of abilities, the colors that should be associated with particular

• 57:22

types of archetypes, the symbologies and iconography that's used as part of those particular visual

• 57:27

effects, some of which obviously people saw in the last cleric demonstration.

• 57:32

But how has that been for you kind of defining those things and creating that style guide?

• 57:36

I mean, it's a comprehensive list, there's 64 classes, right?

• 57:40

And how do you steer and make sure that it doesn't become that visual suit that so many

• 57:45

people I mean, I've played games where it does become visual suit.

• 57:50

And especially it starts to break down every 10th player you add into the mix or every

• 57:55

10th, you know, actor NPC or whatever, right?

• 57:58

How do we accomplish that?

• 57:59

Well, I love that question.

• 58:01

So I mean, I'm a gamer.

• 58:03

And I think that especially in MMOs, when you get to that in game content, and you're

• 58:07

in this huge raid, whether it's like 10 people or 100 people, and all of a sudden, it's like

• 58:11

you can't find your mouse cursor, you're like, if you don't hotkey, you're lost, right?

• 58:15

So, but to answer your question, we're not.

• 58:18

Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to give that to the player.

• 58:20

So the player is going to be able to tune that experience.

• 58:24

So we are going to create a very smart parameterized subset of matrix particle systems.

• 58:31

That's a fancy way of saying that we're going to let you tune what it's like in single player

• 58:35

versus maybe you and your buddy versus a five person party or a giant raid.

• 58:40

Not only that, but let's make it where we can change the camera shake.

• 58:43

And the post process and a particle intensity and then do a global one that scales all of

• 58:48

that.

• 58:49

And give that to the player because I mean, really visual soup is a thing, but there's

• 58:52

a scale that's subjective kind of to the player on how much they want to see of those things

• 58:58

happening in a particular area.

• 58:59

And this is something obviously you guys who've been following the project for a long time

• 59:02

is what we've talked at since the very inception of Ashes is a desire to tackle that particular

• 59:08

issue that many of us have experienced in other games, of course.

• 59:12

So talk to me a little bit about our 64 classes, right?

• 59:16

In those roles, those class fantasies, where do we kind of live when incorporating?

• 59:21

And obviously we have an eight member party, right?

• 59:24

And we have eight archetypes that are associated across our game.

• 59:27

And people know it's kind of a matrix of eight by eight in which creating these classes,

• 59:31

the augment system, all that type of stuff.

• 59:33

People have just now been starting to get a peek under the hood of the creation of these

• 59:36

archetypes and these classes.

• 59:38

What are you most excited to kind of tackle come 2023?

• 59:42

I know that there's a lot of stuff in the works right now and building up towards Alpha

• 59:45

Two.

• 59:46

Of all 64 of them.

• 59:47

Yes, yes.

• 59:48

Probably the Dreadnought because that's my default character.

• 59:53

But actually, I don't know that there's any particular class yet.

• 59:57

I mean, we haven't even shown everybody all the archetypes yet.

• 1:00:00

But I will say I'm pretty excited to see what the Summoner becomes.

• 1:00:04

We haven't shown anything on the Summoner and I'm not necessarily a pet class player

• 1:00:09

myself, but I feel like every Summoner type class that I've seen in games, they usually

• 1:00:16

fall a little bit flat in my opinion.

• 1:00:18

Maybe that's why I don't play them, right?

• 1:00:21

But I'd like to see something a little bit more dynamic with like, you know, summoning

• 1:00:26

in real time in combat rather than, oh, I summon my pet right at the beginning of combat

• 1:00:30

and then it's done.

• 1:00:31

It's out there doing its own thing.

• 1:00:33

I think there's a lot left to be explored there.

• 1:00:37

In fact, we've already written up some stuff about it.

• 1:00:39

Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 1:00:40

And it's some stuff that we've shared a little bit with the community.

• 1:00:42

Just a little bit.

• 1:00:43

Just a little bit, but I think they're going to be excited to see next year kind of some

• 1:00:47

of the stuff that's gone into that.

• 1:00:48

What about you, Keenan?

• 1:00:49

What are you kind of excited about from either a technical challenge perspective when it

• 1:00:52

comes to these ability systems or combat in general or class wise?

• 1:00:58

I think if you're talking about what I'm most excited to work on, I would say all of the

• 1:01:02

bard classes.

• 1:01:03

Ah, okay.

• 1:01:04

I think that the bard seems to have been largely forgotten by modern gaming.

• 1:01:09

So I'm excited to bring it back and show off some of the cool ideas that we have.

• 1:01:13

Yes, I think next year as well people are going to be excited to see how that class

• 1:01:16

interacts from a support perspective for the party and how it kind of lives next to but

• 1:01:22

doesn't encompass the same space as the healer, which is what a lot of previous games I think

• 1:01:27

that try to bring in that bard perspective do.

• 1:01:29

They just throw it on top of the healer's role.

• 1:01:31

And that can be a little bit boring.

• 1:01:33

There's a lot more to support than health bar goes right.

• 1:01:36

Right.

• 1:01:37

Health bar goes right.

• 1:01:38

Whack.

• 1:01:39

Whack a mole pole too.

• 1:01:40

Agreed.

• 1:01:41

How about you, Jim?

• 1:01:42

What about you on the visual effects side?

• 1:01:43

I know you guys got a lot of fun tech working with tech art teams for supporting visual

• 1:01:49

effects, not just from a class perspective, but also on the monster side, NPC encounter

• 1:01:53

side as well.

• 1:01:54

Oh yeah.

• 1:01:55

I mean, we're going to have so much fun.

• 1:01:56

Like monsters and boss fights are going to be unreal because we can just dial that up

• 1:01:59

and really have fun with all the actual tech that's built in the engine, the custom tech.

• 1:02:04

I think from just like a real technical perspective, I'm super excited about augments.

• 1:02:10

I want to do the augmentations and see how these different classes interact and how we

• 1:02:14

can create like the difference between a cleric and a paladin, for example.

• 1:02:19

But from just a selfish point of view, all about the necromancer man.

• 1:02:23

It's going to be incredible.

• 1:02:24

I don't think you're alone there, buddy.

• 1:02:25

It's going to be amazing.

• 1:02:26

And we showed off a little bit, some of the augments, I don't know if everyone picked

• 1:02:33

up on them during some of the demonstrations.

• 1:02:35

There were a few abilities that had some of the augments associated with them, but next

• 1:02:40

year I think in preparation for Alpha 2, there's going to be a lot of that stuff that players

• 1:02:44

are going to get access to and kind of see.

• 1:02:47

You know, it's something that's interesting to me is I think next month we're showcasing

• 1:02:51

the tank archetype and we're going to be showing some of those abilities and within the next

• 1:02:56

couple of months, I might have actually just leaked that.

• 1:02:59

I'm so sorry.

• 1:03:00

Okay, so a little leak in today's video.

• 1:03:03

But within the next couple of months, or I think it's the next two to three months, we're

• 1:03:11

also going to be talking a little bit about showcasing one of the big raid bosses, the

• 1:03:16

Cyclops.

• 1:03:17

And I know that has a lot of visual effects that's going into that encounter, as well

• 1:03:20

as some unique mechanics that are associated with supporting some of that ability that

• 1:03:25

the actual Cyclops has available.

• 1:03:27

And I think people are going to be a little bit shocked by that because it's pretty cool.

• 1:03:31

Well, it's going to be epic.

• 1:03:33

It's going to be insane.

• 1:03:34

I mean, you have this unique problem with big bosses in general.

• 1:03:39

Now I'm going to leak a little more.

• 1:03:41

Hopefully you guys don't have to edit this out.

• 1:03:43

Oh yeah, I'm ready.

• 1:03:44

I'm scared, but I'm ready.

• 1:03:45

So we're going to have this monstrous creature just going across our terrain.

• 1:03:48

It's not going to be your flat arena that you see in every MMO.

• 1:03:52

It's going to have different heights, altitudes, obstacles to climb on.

• 1:03:55

And we got to solve for that.

• 1:03:56

We don't want our effects just hanging in there.

• 1:03:58

We want to mold to the terrain and do different stuff.

• 1:04:01

But I think that's going to be something that I'm really excited about.

• 1:04:04

It's really technical, but it's also going to be something that people are really going

• 1:04:07

to dig.

• 1:04:08

They're going to enjoy it.

• 1:04:09

Oh, for sure.

• 1:04:10

I totally agree.

• 1:04:11

Every little edge case we missed is going to be scaled up 20x.

• 1:04:13

Oh yes.

• 1:04:14

And that's part of the greatness of kind of showcasing.

• 1:04:17

It's how we figure it out.

• 1:04:18

Yes, exactly.

• 1:04:19

And as we get to encounter those problems as the course that we're bringing this to

• 1:04:24

life, and as we're addressing them, we're showing the community as well.

• 1:04:28

That's something that's super cool.

• 1:04:29

Another thing, obviously we're building a massively multiplayer game.

• 1:04:34

And a lot of our encounter design, a lot of the PvP scenarios that players are going to

• 1:04:39

be subjected to, those are very dense populations.

• 1:04:44

And when you're building out this concept of these ability systems, how much of that

• 1:04:50

massively multiplayer component gets taken into account when creating, ideating, so to

• 1:04:55

speak, these mechanics that are provided by engineering, but also the class kits as a

• 1:04:59

holistic view, what abilities we're actually authoring.

• 1:05:03

Do you take into that account?

• 1:05:04

Or is this something that's really more focused around solo gameplay, group gameplay, or massive

• 1:05:10

gameplay?

• 1:05:11

Oh, we've got to think about all of it.

• 1:05:13

From the ground up, in that phase I was talking about earlier, the ideation phase when we're

• 1:05:18

brainstorming these abilities, we always, always have to think about how does this scale

• 1:05:23

up.

• 1:05:24

A lot of games have the luxury of not having to do that.

• 1:05:27

They can design a number of abilities without even having to necessarily consider the performance

• 1:05:34

implications it would have in a networking environment.

• 1:05:37

There's a lot of additional things as designers and engineers and artists that we've got to

• 1:05:43

think about every time.

• 1:05:44

So it kind of blows up the scale of, it can be a little bit mind paralysis sometimes when

• 1:05:51

you think, but we get through it and we've gotten pretty good at it.

• 1:05:55

From a performance as authoring these visual effects, how useful has the migration of Unreal

• 1:06:01

5 been with the use of Niagara in its system?

• 1:06:04

It's key.

• 1:06:05

It's very critical.

• 1:06:06

So every single effect that we author, we have to author for different scenarios, how

• 1:06:10

far away it might be, when we might call stuff, how close it's going to be.

• 1:06:13

We're also going to call stuff.

• 1:06:14

There's no point in having something that just blocks your entire view.

• 1:06:18

So all this will happen in real time dynamically.

• 1:06:20

So we can scale down particle systems based on how many players are active or how your

• 1:06:25

performance might be changing or anything really.

• 1:06:28

Maybe it's a Thanksgiving day and we want to have less effects.

• 1:06:31

We can do that.

• 1:06:32

But it's super robust with the amount of control we have over every aspect of visual effects.

• 1:06:38

And we'll be needing to do all of that to set all these things up because we don't want

• 1:06:42

to have a situation where, oh yeah, our game is really great until we got into the open

• 1:06:46

world PvP and all that stuff.

• 1:06:47

So we're not going to make this...

• 1:06:49

The effect should be there, but it shouldn't be.

• 1:06:52

That's all you see.

• 1:06:53

Right.

• 1:06:54

It's complementing absolutely the mechanics and the gameplay 100%.

• 1:06:57

Keenan, obviously on the engineering side, the gameplay engineering side, you of course

• 1:07:01

have to field these requests for different types of mechanics that need to be authored.

• 1:07:05

But when you think about performance-related considerations for the ability systems, stats

• 1:07:11

to kind of quickly update, all of the stuff interacting with the network, how has that

• 1:07:16

been for you from a challenging standpoint?

• 1:07:18

Yeah.

• 1:07:20

With the scalability requirement cranked to 10, it pretty much makes every aspect of combat

• 1:07:24

like three times harder than it would otherwise be.

• 1:07:28

But ultimately, I think we've got a handle on it and we've been very intentional with

• 1:07:34

our data and with our systems so that we can modulate how quickly they receive and send

• 1:07:40

updates based on who cares the most.

• 1:07:43

And so that's going to help us with scalability a lot.

• 1:07:45

That's something that I think a lot of players kind of were noticing in Alpha 1 last year

• 1:07:51

was just the sheer density that was achieved during some of the Castle Siege fights that

• 1:07:56

we had where there were 300 plus players in a particular area.

• 1:08:00

Not many people, I think in today's age, have experienced that and experienced in a way

• 1:08:04

that was performant.

• 1:08:07

And that was something that I think is wholly unique to this project and what we're trying

• 1:08:11

to achieve and accomplish, not just from the combat's perspective and these class kits

• 1:08:15

that we're creating, but how they harmonize with many players in a particular area.

• 1:08:19

So you guys have been doing an awesome job on that.

• 1:08:22

Well, thank you guys for joining us and talking a little bit about what it takes to make this

• 1:08:26

magic come to life.

• 1:08:28

I think I speak on behalf of the community.

• 1:08:30

You guys are doing an awesome job and not just you, of course, the teams that work in

• 1:08:33

association with you and that you're a part of, we're really appreciative of that.

• 1:08:45

Welcome over to our conversation, a little bit about gathering and crafting.

• 1:08:49

And earlier this year, of course, we showed some of the recent work that's been done towards

• 1:08:54

gathering, particularly around trees and the bushes and mining.

• 1:09:00

But I'm joined today by some of the developers who worked on those things.

• 1:09:04

So a little introduction, Hal.

• 1:09:07

I am Hal Anderson, and I'm an environment artist.

• 1:09:10

So that means I work on things like rocks, trees, kind of anything you just see in the

• 1:09:14

environment.

• 1:09:15

Everything that makes the world beautiful.

• 1:09:16

And we also have Alex.

• 1:09:19

Hello, I'm Alex Cudoli.

• 1:09:21

I'm a senior gameplay engineer.

• 1:09:23

I'm a generalist.

• 1:09:24

I wear many hats.

• 1:09:26

I work with animation, environment, many departments.

• 1:09:29

All the things they say.

• 1:09:31

Exactly.

• 1:09:32

We have Cory.

• 1:09:33

Hi, I'm Cory Rice.

• 1:09:34

I'm a technical designer, and I usually focus on artist and ship, do a little work with

• 1:09:38

AI and also our design tools.

• 1:09:40

Yeah, and a lot of economy stuff too as well, yeah?

• 1:09:43

Yeah.

• 1:09:44

So obviously, a lot of people saw the gathering demonstration that we showed where currently

• 1:09:49

like harvesting trees and stuff.

• 1:09:51

We just talked about what goes into kind of inspiring you guys around the experiences

• 1:09:58

you've had in other MMOs or other games where you're out and you're gathering things and

• 1:10:02

crafting.

• 1:10:03

What are some of the favorite experiences you guys have had?

• 1:10:06

I think for me personally, one of my favorite kind of like harvesting things that I really

• 1:10:12

love in an MMO would be just all the little plants you find around in elder schools online.

• 1:10:18

Yes, they're so good.

• 1:10:20

Oh my gosh, there's so many of them too.

• 1:10:23

I love just kind of scouring the environment, kind of seeing what you can find.

• 1:10:27

I think they have such good design too.

• 1:10:28

You can always like visually really spot them, like, oh, that's gonna go over there.

• 1:10:32

See what I can find.

• 1:10:34

Yeah, what about you, Ock?

• 1:10:35

For me, probably realism, specifically ArcheAge.

• 1:10:40

I spent a lot of time scouring all the lands to find illegal farms, all of that, but like

• 1:10:47

any trees.

• 1:10:48

But the fun part about it is like after a while, you go outside and be like, oh, I know

• 1:10:52

what that tree is.

• 1:10:53

Oh, I know what that tree is.

• 1:10:54

A little bit of learning from the game.

• 1:10:55

Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:56

And then you're like, oh, this is an Aspen tree.

• 1:10:57

I know that.

• 1:10:58

I do like that too, where there's a hint of realism kind of in what you're experiencing

• 1:11:02

the game and how you can associate that with the real world.

• 1:11:05

What about you, Cory?

• 1:11:06

Yeah, totally.

• 1:11:07

I really like the exploration part of it.

• 1:11:09

Searching around for things and like how mentioned there being like things that catch your eye

• 1:11:13

and oftentimes you're like, oh, there's some gold.

• 1:11:16

And then you find yourself at the bottom of the dungeon and you're like, oh god, what

• 1:11:19

am I doing here?

• 1:11:20

Maybe meet some friends.

• 1:11:21

Wait a minute.

• 1:11:22

That's not a friend.

• 1:11:23

Exactly.

• 1:11:24

This guy's trying to take my gold.

• 1:11:25

And then we fight.

• 1:11:26

And then we fight.

• 1:11:27

And yeah, just get you into all sorts of different adventurous situations.

• 1:11:30

It's such an important part, obviously, of MMO design, right?

• 1:11:34

It brings kind of the environment that you're in, the world that you're in, and it makes

• 1:11:37

it a bit tactile.

• 1:11:38

It makes it something that you can leverage to further advance your character, your position,

• 1:11:43

the wealth that you might have.

• 1:11:45

And one of the things that I think was really interesting about our approach on these gatherables

• 1:11:52

out in the real world was even simulating a bit more of that realism, not just from

• 1:11:56

the type of thing you're gathering, but how that thing interacts with you in the world.

• 1:12:00

And one of the things that sticks out is the design of these trees falling and the physics

• 1:12:05

associated with them.

• 1:12:06

And I know we talked a little bit about during the demonstration, but you know, talk a little

• 1:12:09

bit about what it took to get there from a tech feasibility perspective.

• 1:12:13

Oh, it's a lot of work.

• 1:12:15

I mean, it's a lot of cross departmental work.

• 1:12:20

For example, like we have to work, figure out how we want to simulate the physics, what

• 1:12:25

kind of collisions we want to have to have on trees, as well as making sure that they

• 1:12:32

simulate similarly on every client as well, so that it doesn't feel off-putting for one

• 1:12:37

player to see it falling to the left, for other players falling to the right.

• 1:12:40

Like, oh my God, this tree just hit me.

• 1:12:42

No, it didn't.

• 1:12:43

It hit that guy.

• 1:12:44

Exactly.

• 1:12:45

Yeah.

• 1:12:46

So, but yeah, no, physics is, as I was saying before, it's a wild beast to tame.

• 1:12:50

It's just a lot of tweaks.

• 1:12:52

You have to have a lot of patience figuring out all the constraints, you know, all the

• 1:12:57

volumes.

• 1:12:58

It's just hard work.

• 1:13:00

And even from a performance perspective, right, we have thousands of foliage actors that might

• 1:13:06

live within a particular area that's very small, maybe one and a half by one and a half

• 1:13:10

kilometers zone, right?

• 1:13:11

Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:13

And you want to make sure it's per request, so as you're chopping down, so it's not always,

• 1:13:18

you know, there, otherwise, you know, our client FPS is probably going to be pretty

• 1:13:22

bad.

• 1:13:23

Right.

• 1:13:24

So we do a neat trick when you are coming up to the tree, we swapped it to skeletal

• 1:13:28

mesh and then you cut it down and then as it starts to fall, we start simulating physics.

• 1:13:35

And as it falls down, we kind of like freeze it up in the end and then slowly like dissipates.

• 1:13:40

Right.

• 1:13:41

And Hal, tell me a little bit about what it takes to actually bring one of those assets

• 1:13:45

with joints and a skeletal rig so that the impact on the tree can show the physics and

• 1:13:51

the branches moving.

• 1:13:52

What did that take from an environment perspective?

• 1:13:54

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:13:56

So I think definitely got a lot of help from animation, you know, all the animators on

• 1:14:02

our team kind of setting that set up.

• 1:14:03

But I think from an environment perspective, our kind of most challenging thing was kind

• 1:14:07

of setting up the skeletal rig so they can all kind of communicate efficiently and kind

• 1:14:12

of finding a nice balance between so like, you know, one branch doesn't have all the

• 1:14:16

weight, you know, it's able to kind of fall and be in a fluid.

• 1:14:20

Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:14:21

And you have to make different states as well, right?

• 1:14:23

Because it's not just about being able to gather this particular thing in the world,

• 1:14:29

but also at what stage is that thing?

• 1:14:31

Is it an adolescent?

• 1:14:32

Is it a young tree?

• 1:14:34

What type of harvest can I get from it if I were to, let's say, gather it earlier in

• 1:14:38

its lifespan, right?

• 1:14:39

That has some design principles associated with those.

• 1:14:41

Yeah, definitely.

• 1:14:42

Like we wanted it to look good when it falls down, but we also wanted the environment to

• 1:14:46

look really good during different seasons and different stages of life of the thing

• 1:14:50

that you're harvesting.

• 1:14:51

So not only did they have to do that work one time making a tree look good, but we wanted

• 1:14:56

it to work on all the variants.

• 1:14:57

And we wanted it to work when it's a small little sapling or a mature tree.

• 1:15:00

So yeah, just figuring all that out and all the different permutations of it was interesting.

• 1:15:07

It's interesting.

• 1:15:08

And also, not only that, but when you think about kind of showcasing those different stages

• 1:15:14

of life for a particular asset, that obviously creates an additional amount of work on the

• 1:15:18

asset side, right?

• 1:15:20

To create those particular stages of that mesh's lifespan, right?

• 1:15:24

Yes, yeah, it does.

• 1:15:26

Yeah, I think that kind of like in a forest, like one thing that was really important for

• 1:15:32

the environment team was kind of showing not just one kind of monolithic tree, but having

• 1:15:37

different kind of varieties.

• 1:15:38

So you can see that it's just like a living forest that like grows and has different stages

• 1:15:42

of life.

• 1:15:43

And it definitely is a lot of work.

• 1:15:46

Because now you're not just making the tree at the adult stage, you're making it at the

• 1:15:50

sapling, you're making it at the other.

• 1:15:52

And then talk to me a little bit about kind of how we achieve that scaling between these

• 1:15:57

different stages.

• 1:15:58

I think the first thing we wanted to achieve is to make sure that environment artists can

• 1:16:03

place them at the painted stage so that it sets up the general environment.

• 1:16:10

And then creating multiple states that it iterates over efficiently.

• 1:16:14

Once you can chop down like adult stage and goes, for example, to empty, it has to make

• 1:16:19

sure it replicates to every other player.

• 1:16:22

And then it transitioned into a sapling stage, into young stage.

• 1:16:26

And all the data needs to make sure it propagates to every client that sees it.

• 1:16:30

And make sure that also the bandwidth is not too large.

• 1:16:34

Because we want to, you know, keep the network traffic a little cheaper.

• 1:16:38

Exactly.

• 1:16:39

We don't want you to run through the forest in like 400 megabytes.

• 1:16:42

Oh my God.

• 1:16:44

Exactly.

• 1:16:45

Corey, obviously, you know, design has some significant intents when it comes to the variety

• 1:16:50

of the types of gatherables you have access to.

• 1:16:54

And as many of our players know, the professions that relate to these particular gatherables

• 1:17:00

and what you can do with them are also expansive.

• 1:17:03

How do you guys on design go about kind of architecting what that pyramid, so to speak,

• 1:17:09

of gatherables are within the world?

• 1:17:11

It is the base of the economy, right?

• 1:17:13

So all the processing professions and crafting professions kind of start with what's gathered

• 1:17:18

from the world.

• 1:17:19

And we start by like determining what needs to be fulfilled.

• 1:17:25

So players need armor and consumables and weapons.

• 1:17:28

So each one of those things sort of like fits in their lane.

• 1:17:31

And we need to define what things should exist in the world so that we can make those, right?

• 1:17:35

So that was kind of the first step.

• 1:17:38

Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:17:39

Now, obviously, it's interesting to see when you go up to a particular rock and you mine

• 1:17:45

it.

• 1:17:46

It takes obviously some amount of time that it takes to gather that particular resource.

• 1:17:53

What types of profession-related progression can influence that time that's spent?

• 1:17:59

But also, and we've talked a little bit about this in the past, there's an element of prospecting

• 1:18:05

that occurs.

• 1:18:07

Talk to me a little bit about that and how it interacts with the system.

• 1:18:09

Yeah, so we definitely want progression, right?

• 1:18:12

Like the more time you spend mining and the more effort you put into understanding how

• 1:18:16

mining works in Ashes, along with other gathering professions, we want you to get better at

• 1:18:21

it.

• 1:18:22

And there's different ways, right?

• 1:18:23

You can get gear, you can progress in the profession, and like you said, get faster

• 1:18:27

and maybe find better stuff.

• 1:18:29

And one of the ways to be able to find better stuff is through surveying.

• 1:18:32

And surveying is a way of kind of scanning the area, narrowing down what you're looking

• 1:18:36

for.

• 1:18:37

You know, maybe there's one recipe for a golden sword that you're trying to fill for your

• 1:18:41

friend and he wants it to be of a certain level and certain power.

• 1:18:45

And so you need this specific gold ore.

• 1:18:48

So you're not looking around for any gold, you want the specific gold.

• 1:18:51

So we want to give players the tools to be able to kind of find what they're looking

• 1:18:55

for.

• 1:18:56

And that'll be another thing that they can get better at and work with others to increase

• 1:19:00

their productivity.

• 1:19:01

Absolutely.

• 1:19:02

And with having such an expansive list of gatherables that are available, walk us through

• 1:19:07

a little bit of what that pipeline looks like.

• 1:19:09

I mean, what does it take to actually make a specific type of tree or a specific plant?

• 1:19:14

How does that process begin?

• 1:19:15

Tell us a little bit about that.

• 1:19:16

I think kind of the first step in any type of kind of asset creation like that would

• 1:19:21

be kind of gathering like a reference board, kind of finding out what sort of like real

• 1:19:26

life things we want to draw off of to make sure that's just kind of grounded.

• 1:19:30

And then also kind of deciding sort of what kind of like a mood we want to elicit, you

• 1:19:33

know, like, is it going to be a spooky tree?

• 1:19:35

Is it going to be more like, oh, like, is it going to be like a little bit more like

• 1:19:39

it's going to be magical, you know, if you feel like awe and kind of establishing that

• 1:19:42

so we kind of know what to go into the process.

• 1:19:45

The identity of the asset.

• 1:19:46

Exactly.

• 1:19:47

Yeah.

• 1:19:48

Yeah, get that like, get that mood.

• 1:19:49

And yeah, after that is kind of established, we would go into a program called SpeedTree

• 1:19:55

Normally, which kind of allows us artists to set up kind of these like, almost little

• 1:20:00

logic systems, you know, like, we want trees with like branches that are approximately

• 1:20:04

the size, you know, and kind of randomize that so it has that kind of organic element

• 1:20:09

that just, you know, kind of the human brain can't quite can't quite do as well.

• 1:20:13

But yeah, so after we have that, and we have all our geo done, we would then import into

• 1:20:18

Unreal where we would set up all of our like wind data and all of our seasonal technology.

• 1:20:23

Yeah.

• 1:20:24

And there's a lot that goes into that, right?

• 1:20:25

Because when we talked about this in an earlier segment about seasons and how that impacts

• 1:20:30

kind of all the assets that are within the world, because they all have to not just have

• 1:20:33

stages of growth when they've been gathered, but they also need to reflect the season as

• 1:20:39

well.

• 1:20:40

So that tree might lose leaves, right?

• 1:20:42

Or that plant might not even be available within a particular season.

• 1:20:46

And that's something that ties into on the engineering side, which is something you have

• 1:20:51

to take into account on the spawners, right?

• 1:20:54

And how you're kind of bringing that up.

• 1:20:55

How does that work?

• 1:20:56

Well, we just need to hook we basically hook into the seasonal tech.

• 1:21:01

And we query our service to figure out, okay, is this a winter?

• 1:21:05

Is this spring?

• 1:21:06

Is this summer?

• 1:21:08

And when the tree transitions to state to another, we check, okay, is this supposed

• 1:21:13

to happen during winter?

• 1:21:14

Is this supposed to happen during spring?

• 1:21:16

What kind of yield it's supposed to maybe give, right?

• 1:21:18

And that manager doesn't just take into account necessarily all that information as well,

• 1:21:23

but it also takes into account another system that we talked a little bit about, which is

• 1:21:27

land management.

• 1:21:28

And that can also affect kind of spawn rate, frequency, density within a particular area,

• 1:21:35

length and longevity of time to promote to different stages.

• 1:21:38

Tell me a little bit about your expectations for land management as it affects things like

• 1:21:43

gathering and crafting as a whole.

• 1:21:45

Yeah, my expectations are that it creates cool entry points for content.

• 1:21:50

You know, players have different expectations of the things that they want to achieve for

• 1:21:54

themselves and they extend that out to groups like their guilds or their node and whatever,

• 1:21:59

right?

• 1:22:00

So, you know, you might not want to chop down every single tree outside of your node because

• 1:22:04

you like using those trees for harvesting the fruit, right?

• 1:22:07

And if another group of players wants to cut them down because they want wood before a

• 1:22:11

siege, right?

• 1:22:12

Like those are conflicts that players will need to work out and interact with each other

• 1:22:16

to solve, right?

• 1:22:17

And then we can hook up into content that we create ourselves, not necessarily player

• 1:22:22

to player where maybe you cut down all the trees and you piss off a tree ant.

• 1:22:25

It's a predicate, right?

• 1:22:27

Exactly.

• 1:22:28

So that's why we think that land management is so interesting because it gives us a way

• 1:22:31

to hook into all these different content points and do cool stuff.

• 1:22:35

And so much in the world of Vera is built around this idea of players committed action

• 1:22:41

and the action has a response from the system or from other players potentially, right?

• 1:22:46

And as we're talking about how land management is just another value that can represent some

• 1:22:52

predicate system in that event or in allowing a policy, perhaps you're a more industrious

• 1:22:57

node if you constantly keep the land management at a low value, right?

• 1:23:02

All of those things are just giving the tools that we get to implement around either from

• 1:23:06

a narrative perspective or from a systemic one.

• 1:23:09

And that I think creates a very dynamic atmosphere that not a lot of players are accustomed to

• 1:23:14

in the games that we play, which offer things like gathering.

• 1:23:18

You know, typically it's a very kind of binary system, I do a thing, I get a thing.

• 1:23:23

But here I do a thing and there's a whole host of stuff that can happen as a response.

• 1:23:27

Exactly.

• 1:23:28

Yeah, the non-binary part of it is very important because it's not always this action equals

• 1:23:34

bad, right?

• 1:23:35

Right.

• 1:23:36

It is a whole slew of options of things that can happen.

• 1:23:39

So even if, you know, you think that cutting down all of the trees is going to piss off

• 1:23:43

the tree ant, there might be a whole slew of positive things that happen, you know,

• 1:23:48

after you defeat the tree ant or when the tree ant spawns and becomes someone that you

• 1:23:53

can interact with in the world.

• 1:23:54

So it's not always black and white, whether an action is good or bad, which I think is

• 1:23:58

very interesting.

• 1:23:59

It is very interesting.

• 1:24:00

And for example, that tree ant, many years ago, I think circa 2018, we showed a big tree

• 1:24:09

ant model that Keith worked on.

• 1:24:11

Remember that guy?

• 1:24:12

Yeah.

• 1:24:13

I don't know.

• 1:24:14

Maybe we'll see him if people chop down a little too many trees.

• 1:24:17

That might be interesting.

• 1:24:19

So obviously you're all MMO gamers.

• 1:24:20

We've been talking with a lot of MMO gamers here at the studio.

• 1:24:23

Many of us are MMO gamers.

• 1:24:25

What is the profession you're looking most forward to?

• 1:24:28

Go ahead.

• 1:24:30

Oh yeah.

• 1:24:31

What type of thing do you like to do from a crafting artisan perspective?

• 1:24:37

Oh, I think my personal favorite would be kind of anything in line with like the, like

• 1:24:44

harvesting, gathering potions.

• 1:24:46

Oh, alchemist.

• 1:24:47

Okay.

• 1:24:48

Very nice.

• 1:24:49

You like getting the perfect ingredients to make some type of potion that's going to come

• 1:24:53

in handy during some engagement.

• 1:24:55

That's awesome.

• 1:24:56

I also love alchemy by the way.

• 1:24:59

Don't tell anybody that.

• 1:25:02

What about you Alec?

• 1:25:03

For me, probably it would be whichever corner is the market.

• 1:25:06

Oh, there you go.

• 1:25:07

Opportunist.

• 1:25:08

You're an economist.

• 1:25:09

I'm an opportunist.

• 1:25:10

There you go.

• 1:25:11

So whatever is most worthwhile.

• 1:25:12

Exactly.

• 1:25:13

Especially with our node system, a lot of nodes going to need a lot of materials, resources.

• 1:25:18

We're going to have to, yeah, it's just, you know.

• 1:25:21

And that actually brings up a really good point because the way that the environment

• 1:25:27

is constructed, a lot of these gatherables and ergo the craftable components of those

• 1:25:34

gatherables are determined by location.

• 1:25:38

And so you're not just creating one giant economy, you're also creating local economies

• 1:25:44

as well, which relate to the transition of those goods across the world, which can make

• 1:25:48

it more opportunistic with some danger or risk involved.

• 1:25:51

Yeah.

• 1:25:52

That's super interesting.

• 1:25:53

I like that.

• 1:25:54

I'm kind of there too.

• 1:25:55

What about you Cory?

• 1:25:56

For me, it'd be really hard to choose just one.

• 1:25:58

I love fishing.

• 1:26:00

I'll try fishing in every game no matter what.

• 1:26:02

I really like crafting of equipment, whether that's like armor or weapons.

• 1:26:06

There's something special to me about outfitting yourself or another person for an adventure

• 1:26:11

that they're going on.

• 1:26:13

You have that interaction of like, what do you need?

• 1:26:14

Yeah, I can make that for you.

• 1:26:16

There's initial investment and they take that thing with them and they may trade it and

• 1:26:20

sell it and that item specifically has a story, right?

• 1:26:23

It's not the same as consumables where you're like, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:26:27

You use like a hundred of them a day.

• 1:26:29

And then engineering is really interesting to me.

• 1:26:31

I like little gadgets.

• 1:26:32

Those usually end up being the things that break some of the rules and you get to do

• 1:26:36

special funny things.

• 1:26:37

So engineering is always like very, very interesting.

• 1:26:41

Very interesting.

• 1:26:42

You know, it actually brings up something else that I was just thinking about, which

• 1:26:48

is essentially that you're working on something with engineering regarding kind of a gameplay

• 1:26:55

layer around crafting itself, right?

• 1:26:59

Talk to me a little bit about what that is.

• 1:27:01

So yeah, we're trying to put together kind of a more haptic or rooted in the world.

• 1:27:06

I guess the right word is like a diegetic experience for making weapons.

• 1:27:11

You know, oftentimes in other games or other MMOs I've played, there's a lot on the front

• 1:27:17

end of like, you get stuff and you have the stuff and then you push a button and the item

• 1:27:22

comes out.

• 1:27:23

Right, the execution is just a button.

• 1:27:24

Yeah, and all of the, there is like skill and some gameplay to that portion, right?

• 1:27:31

And I think that that will also be great in Ashes where, you know, I have to acquire all

• 1:27:34

the things and there's risk and there's trade.

• 1:27:36

But I also think that it's interesting to have skill involved in the actual crafting.

• 1:27:42

So what we're trying to put together is a way to make weapons where it feels like you're

• 1:27:47

actually making the thing.

• 1:27:49

And how you do in making the weapon results in what the stats of the weapon are going

• 1:27:54

to be.

• 1:27:55

Very cool.

• 1:27:56

So that's what we're working on.

• 1:27:57

And that's something that I think players are going to have an opportunity next year

• 1:28:01

to kind of take a look at.

• 1:28:02

And we're going to have an opportunity to collect good feedback from you around whether

• 1:28:06

or not you like that element of gameplay layer associated with the crafting profession, right?

• 1:28:13

I think that's going to be super cool.

• 1:28:15

Well guys, I want to thank you for having this conversation with me and our audience,

• 1:28:19

of course.

• 1:28:20

They're very grateful for your contributions to making Ashes of Creation a reality.

• 1:28:24

And you guys are doing a phenomenal job.

• 1:28:26

So thank you very well done.

• 1:28:27

We are going to be moving on next to a little video that showcases this last year with our

• 1:28:34

studio and the project.

• 1:28:42

Building games is difficult.

• 1:28:43

That being said, we built an amazing team at Intrepid.

• 1:28:47

And it feels very much like a family.

• 1:28:49

So getting up each day and going into the office and working with the colleagues at

• 1:28:57

Intrepid is a delight.

• 1:29:24

What a year it has been.

• 1:29:27

The team has been hard at work.

• 1:29:29

You've seen the progress of Ashes of Creation over the last four or five years.

• 1:29:34

And you've seen where we've come from in that time to our Alpha One presentation.

• 1:29:38

And you can see how things develop.

• 1:29:43

Super excited with the character creator.

• 1:29:45

And I have very rarely ever encountered a character creator, even at this state, that

• 1:29:51

is as capable as what our team has been able to develop.

• 1:29:57

Every day that passes and I'm watching the tech continue to get refined and the environments

• 1:30:04

continue to get these passes.

• 1:30:06

And I'm just talking to the team and like, so good.

• 1:30:13

The new world map in all its 1200 square kilometer glory.

• 1:30:33

I love what the new skybox is doing.

• 1:30:36

I mean, it's just visually great.

• 1:30:45

I am so happy to see the excitement from the MMORPG community at large.

• 1:30:51

Like that looks crazy good.

• 1:30:56

That is just oh my god.

• 1:30:58

Like whenever people are talking about how they want fantasy games, this is what they're

• 1:31:03

thinking.

• 1:31:05

It grows into a horse.

• 1:31:06

I didn't know that.

• 1:31:09

This game looks amazing.

• 1:31:16

Way too good.

• 1:31:17

Ashes of creation.

• 1:31:18

It will be the most ambitious fantasy MMORPG ever attempted.

• 1:31:23

No, no.

• 1:31:24

It looks good.

• 1:31:25

It does look good.

• 1:31:26

Grab yourself a...

• 1:31:27

The team behind Ashes of Creation are some of the most talented developers.

• 1:31:42

What we're building in Ashes of Creation is the ultimate desire of a true MMORPG Ashes

• 1:32:05

team.

• 1:32:12

Thank you everyone so much for joining us.

• 1:32:14

That's going to be a wrap for us for our December livestream update.

• 1:32:17

We hope that you enjoyed it and loved getting to know our developers.

• 1:32:20

That was so much fun chatting with everyone.

• 1:32:23

They're so sweet.

• 1:32:24

Everyone's amazing and you can just see the vibe is just so...

• 1:32:27

Everyone's just passionate and loves what they do and that's kind of like the best part

• 1:32:30

of the game.

• 1:32:31

Super talented.

• 1:32:32

I know.

• 1:32:33

Just a great team.

• 1:32:34

Absolutely.

• 1:32:35

Of course, if you have feedback for us, head on over to our forums, forums.ashesofcreation.com.

• 1:32:39

We love hearing from you guys.

• 1:32:40

We interact with you always.

• 1:32:42

We're sending reports to our developers so they can continue to make sure that we're

• 1:32:45

on the same page as we move forward in creating the world of Verra.

• 1:32:48

Those reports are super important.

• 1:32:51

Really they are.

• 1:32:52

The community does such a great job of picking out all the tidbits of information from the

• 1:32:56

players on the forums, on Twitter, on Reddit, everywhere.

• 1:32:59

They read everything.

• 1:33:00

They compile it in a huge report and there's an hour that we kind of sit down with the

• 1:33:04

developments of particular features and or systems and kind of hear from the community

• 1:33:10

team all the thoughts that you guys give about these particular subjects.

• 1:33:13

So it's very important.

• 1:33:14

Make sure you guys go and give commentary on stuff.

• 1:33:17

And most often the thing is, wow, that's already stuff we're already planning and we're already

• 1:33:20

thinking of.

• 1:33:21

So I think that's the validation that we're all on the same page.

• 1:33:24

So thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:33:26

And of course you can follow us in all places at Ashes of Creation.

• 1:33:29

We are constantly posting and giving you guys updates on a daily basis and interacting with

• 1:33:33

you and we love all your fan art.

• 1:33:35

So please keep sending them back to us.

• 1:33:38

So good.

• 1:33:39

2022 isn't just the last year.

• 1:33:42

This is going to say like it's really cool to just look back at what we accomplished

• 1:33:45

this year in 2022 as a team.

• 1:33:47

The growth of the studio has been huge, but it's not done yet.

• 1:33:50

We're still going.

• 1:33:51

We're going strong into 2023.

• 1:33:53

So keep that in mind.

• 1:33:54

You guys check out our page and come join our family and direct others, people out there,

• 1:34:00

your favorite developers, stuff that you've seen.

• 1:34:03

Make sure to go out on Twitter and share the careers opportunities that that interrupted

• 1:34:07

because 20th is going to be a huge year.

• 1:34:09

Oh my gosh.

• 1:34:10

Yeah.

• 1:34:11

I had done a big thing for Steven to put together a whole like spreadsheet.

• 1:34:13

So we've got a lot to come.

• 1:34:17

It looks super good.

• 1:34:18

And guys, you haven't seen anything yet.

• 1:34:21

2023 is going to be an unbelievable year for the studio, for the project.

• 1:34:25

We have so much to show you.

• 1:34:26

I know Margaret is just chomping at the bits to get in there and get all this stuff and

• 1:34:31

share with you guys.

• 1:34:33

And you know, honestly, I just want to comment on the fact that this development that we

• 1:34:37

have, this rapport that we've built with you guys as a community and the safety we feel

• 1:34:42

in sharing works in progress with you, sharing the development along its lifespan of development

• 1:34:48

with each of you out there is very important and near and dear to our hearts.

• 1:34:52

So keep tuning in in 2023.

• 1:34:55

Keep commenting, give us your feedback, give us your thoughts, give us the experiences

• 1:34:58

that you guys have had in the past because it makes the potential for Ashes of Creation

• 1:35:03

to be such that much more of a great game when you guys are participating in it.

• 1:35:07

And that's why we do these things.

• 1:35:08

That's why we invite you in.

• 1:35:10

We show you what we're working on on a monthly basis because we want you guys to give us

• 1:35:14

your feedback.

• 1:35:16

And so we cannot thank you all enough for being a part of that in 2022.

• 1:35:20

And 2023 is going to be an awesome year and we will see you in January next month.

• 1:35:26

Bye guys.