Talk:2023-09-29 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Event Update

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Transcription brute

• 00:00

Hello everyone and welcome to another live stream from the glorious world of Vera and

• 00:26

we have an exciting showcase to give you all today.

• 00:30

We're going to be talking about our event system and I am actually joined by three of

• 00:36

our absolutely wonderful developers with whom you've spoken with in the past on some other

• 00:42

live streams.

• 00:43

We have one of our glorious engineers Clayton Clayton.

• 00:47

Wow absolutely wonderful glorious.

• 00:49

What an introduction.

• 00:50

I'm doing great.

• 00:51

I know really.

• 00:52

I'm really excited to show off all of our hard work so very excited to see it with you

• 00:58

and excited to chat with the community about it.

• 01:00

I know you guys have been doing a lot of hard work on this.

• 01:03

We also have two of our wonderful designers Scott.

• 01:07

How you doing buddy.

• 01:08

Excellent.

• 01:09

I'm very excited to be here.

• 01:10

Yay.

• 01:11

And I'm Amy.

• 01:12

I mean how are you doing.

• 01:13

Hi I'm good.

• 01:14

Last time I was here we took down two mocks so I'm I'm ready today.

• 01:18

I'm playing cleric again.

• 01:19

So yeah I got your back.

• 01:23

Thank you.

• 01:24

OK so you heard it here first folks if I die.

• 01:26

We know whose fault it is.

• 01:28

It's of course not my fault.

• 01:31

It would be the cleric's fault.

• 01:33

But OK so where are we.

• 01:35

We are in a familiar biome.

• 01:38

Many of you guys should be expecting where we are.

• 01:40

We are in the wonderful riverlands.

• 01:43

We are a little bit east of the last live stream location which was the Winstead node.

• 01:49

Yeah I see Carfinn in the distance.

• 01:51

Yep Carfinn is even further east from Winstead.

• 01:54

So we're kind of sandwiched between Winstead and Carfinn right now.

• 01:58

No big curse happening right now so it's a nice day out.

• 02:00

OK so it's a nice day out.

• 02:02

There's not like any type of blood curse or undead roaming the area.

• 02:05

No not at the moment.

• 02:06

No.

• 02:07

OK very cool.

• 02:08

And what are we doing here in the riverlands.

• 02:12

Talk to me a little bit about what has brought us out here.

• 02:14

And I'm going to jump off my glorious steed here while we talk about that.

• 02:18

Absolutely.

• 02:19

We're actually just out here to kill some mobs, grind some experience, get some resources

• 02:25

maybe out of the land here.

• 02:27

And eventually the world should react to that and we could potentially create an event here.

• 02:34

I see a web weaver.

• 02:37

So OK so our objective right now is we're going to be showing off obviously the event

• 02:42

system and part of that event system is that it can take a whole host of different predicates

• 02:49

to kind of kick off different types of events.

• 02:51

Clayton talk to me a little bit about what that means.

• 02:54

Oh he's on me.

• 02:55

He's on me.

• 02:56

Yeah as soon as I'm not dying.

• 02:58

But yeah so the event system it can query a lot of different aspects of the dynamic

• 03:06

world state.

• 03:07

Right now it's actually just tracking player activity in the world and you know for this

• 03:12

event in particular.

• 03:14

And it's looking for us to kill some stuff.

• 03:16

So we're out here killing some stuff and eventually the event should trigger once it's detected

• 03:21

enough player activity.

• 03:24

Very cool.

• 03:25

And these and these this type of predicate that is the essentially the activity map for

• 03:31

killing the activity map.

• 03:33

That's not the only way that these events can get kicked off.

• 03:35

There's a whole host of different ways that they can also.

• 03:38

Yeah for sure.

• 03:39

Yeah.

• 03:40

So we have a really really awesome system that the designers have access to that lets

• 03:44

them hook into really any dynamic world state and use that to inform the instantiation or

• 03:51

even just like the progression of any event.

• 03:56

Very cool.

• 03:59

These spiders are gross.

• 04:01

Scott what are what are some plans that you have for different predicates for instantiating

• 04:08

some of these events.

• 04:09

Yeah so obviously we just got this kind of generic sort of kill one here that we can

• 04:15

use for all sorts of different things for tracking player activity.

• 04:18

Big bear time.

• 04:20

We also are looking at the amount of resources that players can harvest as a predicate.

• 04:24

We have story arcs that are going on.

• 04:28

So active stories to cause different events to start.

• 04:32

Trade caravans happening relationships between different nodes.

• 04:35

And also just the state of the nodes themselves.

• 04:39

You can let him beat me up here because it's kind of cool.

• 04:42

He's charging.

• 04:43

Yeah.

• 04:44

Oh he will throw you around.

• 04:48

Those bears can can really catch you off guard if you let them.

• 04:52

OK so I see that a nearby event has started.

• 04:57

The predicate has been met.

• 04:59

Oh and I see now on the mini map we have a little bit of a location for it.

• 05:03

Yeah.

• 05:04

So just south of us here we're just kind of the event has kind of kicked off because of

• 05:11

the just us killing stuff around in the area here.

• 05:14

And we might see some visual indicators over the hill here in a second.

• 05:20

And so when when one of these events kick off it's not just obviously notifying players

• 05:24

based off of their proximity with the mini map and with the you know UI toast that pops

• 05:29

up.

• 05:30

But also as you said Clayton we have a visual indicator in world that's also rooting the

• 05:34

event as well.

• 05:35

Yeah for sure.

• 05:36

You know Scott can probably touch on you know the diegetic nature of all of our narrative

• 05:41

content and the goals there.

• 05:45

But oh wait hold on before we get too close I'm seeing that there's some gray shore archers

• 05:51

and a gray shore swordsman.

• 05:54

OK.

• 05:55

All right.

• 05:57

Oh should I join this event as a defender team.

• 06:00

Definitely yes.

• 06:01

And that'll allow if some other players do come around while we're playing that will

• 06:06

allow them to join the event raid group with us.

• 06:11

So we've effectively taken the party that we had preformed and merge that into a new

• 06:18

raid group.

• 06:21

OK I slept a couple of these of the high captains.

• 06:26

There's some of them on the settlers right now.

• 06:28

Oh God OK and the settlers are an objective type that exists within this particular archers.

• 06:33

Yeah exactly.

• 06:34

Yeah.

• 06:35

Oh my God.

• 06:36

There's a lot of them.

• 06:37

No they're sniping from up on top of the rocks.

• 06:40

Thanks Amy.

• 06:41

Oh I see.

• 06:42

I'm sorry I'm going to go for the long gun.

• 06:45

Scott's down.

• 06:46

Oh God.

• 06:47

Oh no no no.

• 06:48

OK.

• 06:49

The event difficulty did change though.

• 06:53

Why did the event difficulty change?

• 06:54

That's a good thing.

• 06:55

It means we got back up.

• 06:56

There are people here to help us.

• 06:58

Oh yeah I see them up on the hill.

• 07:00

They're coming down.

• 07:01

Oh they joined the raid.

• 07:02

They joined the raid.

• 07:05

We're distracting the bandits from the settlers right now so that's good.

• 07:08

None of them have died.

• 07:10

Caravan integrity is good.

• 07:15

OK I see the caravan integrity on the event notification window.

• 07:22

It looks like they're mostly just going for the settlers right now.

• 07:24

Oh no those poor settlers.

• 07:27

We've kept them up.

• 07:28

Nope I just saw one die.

• 07:30

Oh God two of them went out at once.

• 07:34

Alright.

• 07:35

Why did you say something?

• 07:36

I shouldn't have mentioned it.

• 07:38

They would have been fine.

• 07:40

So our objective here is to protect these settlers while we eliminate 20 of these high

• 07:44

human.

• 07:46

OK.

• 07:49

OK but there's probably another wave coming.

• 07:52

Yes.

• 07:53

There's still some shore, there's still some gray shore people around.

• 07:56

Well I see some of them coming from northeast.

• 07:59

There's an arsonist coming.

• 08:00

Oh there we go.

• 08:01

There we go.

• 08:02

Oh and some from downhill northwest too.

• 08:04

Scott, why are they coming from the north?

• 08:08

So we're actually pretty near one of our POIs which is actually under bandit control.

• 08:14

The aptly named Highwayman Hills is just over the corner, just around the corner here.

• 08:19

So they'll be attacking NPCs in this area until such a time as players deal with it

• 08:25

via story arc.

• 08:29

And the settlers were trying to keep these guys alive right?

• 08:34

OK we did it.

• 08:36

OK.

• 08:37

Two survived.

• 08:38

OK so it says prepare for the final assault.

• 08:41

This is staged based off of our progress, our activity, our success.

• 08:47

What is this?

• 08:48

So we defeated the requisite number of bandits there.

• 08:54

Which is going to progress the stage here.

• 08:57

And during this stage here we can reset some of the traps that the bandits used to initially

• 09:02

destroy the convoy.

• 09:03

And we can use those against the bandits in the next phase which is actually more difficult.

• 09:07

So yeah we'll definitely need them.

• 09:12

Whenever the bandits do come with reinforcements they're probably going to be bringing their

• 09:16

best so.

• 09:18

Especially because we have more players now.

• 09:20

So the difficulty of the event will be more when there are more players.

• 09:23

And of course like all things in Ashes the more difficult the challenge the better the

• 09:26

rewards.

• 09:27

And also our clerics can have some time to heal up the settlers and hopefully set us

• 09:36

up for success whenever the next round does come in.

• 09:41

And how do we leverage the reward system?

• 09:44

How are people getting calculated what rewards they should get?

• 09:48

So we have kind of a number of metrics that we can use.

• 09:53

I think we're going to be doing a lot of testing to figure out what the best metrics are because

• 09:56

there are some ups and downs using the amount of damage you've done in the raid and stuff

• 10:01

like that.

• 10:02

And we're also more relaxed things like how much time you spent participating in the event.

• 10:08

Whether that's doing damage or healing allies and things like that as a percentage of the

• 10:12

total time of the event.

• 10:14

They all have their drawbacks and benefits.

• 10:15

And we've got to be careful about that.

• 10:18

Yeah, we'll just count up the contribution however we end up balancing that.

• 10:23

And then we have different tiers of rewards that are given to each individual player based

• 10:28

off of their contribution score in the event.

• 10:31

As it works right now it is just simply a matter of how much time you've participated

• 10:35

in the event as a percentage of the total time of the event.

• 10:39

Very nice.

• 10:40

So as that winds down people will be granted a gold, silver, bronze tier kind of reward

• 10:47

status and that will be the entitlement for the types of rewards they get from these events.

• 10:53

And really that's just going to determine the reward table that they're going to get

• 10:56

and then each player is going to roll their own reward table independently.

• 10:59

Very nice.

• 11:00

I hope I'm going to get rewarded for all the healing I'm doing.

• 11:04

Yeah, I mean you deserve it.

• 11:07

A raid leader?

• 11:09

Yep, our timer is up and Corvin the crusher appears to be on the way.

• 11:15

Oh god, he's coming.

• 11:17

Alright.

• 11:18

We're going to need healing almost immediately.

• 11:23

Oh my god, there's a lot.

• 11:24

I'm going to try to sleep some of them.

• 11:26

Oh, never mind, there's multiple balls of lightning.

• 11:30

Let's see if I can line this up right.

• 11:34

I'm going to try and use the traps as best I can.

• 11:43

Man this is really great.

• 11:44

I am on fire.

• 11:45

We have them at a choke point right now.

• 11:47

We definitely want to keep them away.

• 11:48

Oh, there's birds.

• 11:49

We want to keep them away from the caravan and then this choke point.

• 11:52

I got them to trigger the trap over here.

• 11:54

I'm hitting them with a lot of AoEs right now.

• 11:58

And the only objective here as you can see from the tracker is to kill Corvin.

• 12:03

So until Corvin goes down.

• 12:05

Yep, I'm trying to prioritize their healing and DPS so that we can have a better chance

• 12:11

here.

• 12:12

I think with the raid group of eight, we seem to be set up for success here.

• 12:17

Corvin the crusher.

• 12:19

Hey, looks like Scott, would either of you want to touch on the event difficulty tier

• 12:25

and what we intend to do with that as more players join the event?

• 12:29

Well, sure, as soon as people join in, I, yeah, it just gets more difficult.

• 12:39

I don't know if you saw, but we had a toast saying that the event has progressed from

• 12:45

its original state as a group event to a raid level event.

• 12:50

It was a veteran level and of course that comes with more challenges, more optional

• 12:56

objectives, but also more rewards.

• 13:00

So it's never, it's never going to be like a bother to have other people join you.

• 13:07

It's all part of being in a like multiplayer environment is, you know, the more friends

• 13:13

join up with you the better.

• 13:16

Yeah.

• 13:17

You know, I think it's cool that you touched on the rewards because yeah, the designers

• 13:23

have have the ability, you know, just from a technical perspective to use the difficulty

• 13:29

to your, however they like in the event, they can modify any aspect of the events difficulty

• 13:33

or even, you know, the, the reward that you're, you're getting, they can query that in the

• 13:37

reward table data.

• 13:40

We're doing pretty good here.

• 13:41

This caravan hasn't really been taking much damage at all.

• 13:43

Yeah.

• 13:44

Yeah.

• 13:45

The tank was able to intercept them at that choke point.

• 13:47

So yeah, the truck seems to be working too.

• 13:51

This elite healer is rough.

• 13:54

Yeah.

• 13:55

That should be very hard to kill.

• 13:57

Some of the gray shore swordsmen and the archers are still alive.

• 14:01

We can change that.

• 14:02

We have the technology.

• 14:05

There we go.

• 14:06

Oh, we did it.

• 14:07

Congratulations.

• 14:08

The reward.

• 14:09

Well, you know, there's also a grateful settler here presenting us the reward.

• 14:18

Maybe he has something to say.

• 14:19

Let me talk to him.

• 14:22

Greetings, grateful settler.

• 14:25

Praise Ariok.

• 14:26

They might have killed us without your intervention.

• 14:30

Please help yourself.

• 14:32

I will help myself.

• 14:33

Thank you.

• 14:34

What type of supplies are we talking about?

• 14:35

Oh, you're one of those heroes.

• 14:37

Unbelievable.

• 14:38

I mean, this was a difficult, a difficult task.

• 14:43

You know, you just head over to Highwayman Hills and join the bandits, Steven.

• 14:48

People claim it's unbelievable.

• 14:50

I am a hero in this.

• 14:51

I'm a mayor of a local node.

• 14:53

Oh my God.

• 14:54

A shame it came to violence.

• 14:56

We are hopeful we could leave that behind on Sanctus.

• 14:59

Okay.

• 15:00

Yeah.

• 15:01

I'm hopeful of that too.

• 15:02

But you know, sometimes we can't just get what we hope for.

• 15:05

So, whoa, we got some wool.

• 15:08

Yep.

• 15:09

We got some wool.

• 15:11

Okay.

• 15:12

I got some wool.

• 15:13

That's cool.

• 15:14

You're also granted, on the events completion, you're granted like a little stipend of golden

• 15:17

experience just right away, but items that can be looted off your body, they have to

• 15:20

come from like a reward chest.

• 15:22

So every event will have its own little reward cache at the end of it.

• 15:25

You'll grab your materials and items from.

• 15:27

I actually got some ash and timber as my reward.

• 15:31

Why'd you get ash and timber?

• 15:33

Well, I got that reward from my reward table.

• 15:37

Maybe I participated better than you, so I got a better resource.

• 15:40

How dare you?

• 15:42

I was out there doing a lot of work.

• 15:45

Scott, this NPC, he's also configured to actually interface with some of the story arc content

• 15:51

too, right?

• 15:52

If those story arcs were online.

• 15:53

It's true.

• 15:54

Yeah.

• 15:55

I think it is online actually.

• 15:56

It's just not active.

• 15:57

Check it again, Steven.

• 15:58

Okay.

• 15:59

Where am I going?

• 16:00

Talk to the guy again.

• 16:01

I think you might have missed a dialogue option or it didn't pop up yet.

• 16:03

Oh, here we go.

• 16:04

Okay.

• 16:05

Okay.

• 16:06

The tough one.

• 16:07

Who are these people?

• 16:08

Who are these people?

• 16:09

Let's see.

• 16:10

They're desperate folks who prowl the hills.

• 16:12

One Udoxia in Lionhold is looking into the matter.

• 16:15

I should seek her out and find if there is a better way I could help around here.

• 16:20

You know what?

• 16:21

I will do.

• 16:22

Oh, okay.

• 16:23

Here we go.

• 16:24

I see a lot of different placeholder rewards.

• 16:31

A bridge too far.

• 16:33

Yeah.

• 16:34

The rewards for a lot of the quests are still not fully done yet.

• 16:38

Uh-huh.

• 16:39

The events do hook into all of our story arc content.

• 16:43

So if there are story arcs online, we can, since our quests are nonlinear, events can

• 16:47

help you kind of into those quests.

• 16:50

If they're online, this event can happen whether or not the story arc is online.

• 16:53

But if it is, you can pick up the lead into that quest from him if you haven't been to

• 17:00

Lionhold in a while since the story arc has started.

• 17:03

Very cool.

• 17:04

So obviously, people saw a little bit during this event that the adaptive difficulty was

• 17:11

predicated on the number of participants that opt in to partake in this event, right?

• 17:20

Correct.

• 17:21

Yes.

• 17:22

So as more players join, the event does get more difficult with...

• 17:26

We went from the regular mobs to the elite mobs in Corvin's Entourage.

• 17:31

Some of them can be more enemies to fight.

• 17:36

Some can have completely different stages or mechanics depending on what the event actually

• 17:41

is and what your objectives are for that event.

• 17:44

And these events are based off of different predicates within the world state.

• 17:49

So for example, this particular event was a caravan that was moving throughout the world.

• 17:53

And as we said in the beginning, it was based off of the activity heat map of players within

• 17:57

this area.

• 17:59

But this type of event, this caravan event that was transiting goods, popped up because

• 18:04

nearby nodes may have either been advancing the relationship between each other or there

• 18:09

might have been a trade caravan that got kicked off in the past.

• 18:12

And we're representing kind of that theming within the world by these event types, correct?

• 18:18

Yes.

• 18:19

So events are predicated by things that players are doing, whether that is node development,

• 18:24

trade agreements between nodes, all of that.

• 18:27

Like relationships between nodes, I mean.

• 18:29

So it could be more than just that.

• 18:31

Could be war states or anything like that as well.

• 18:34

So I noticed that even though we succeeded in the event, we're still in our event raid

• 18:39

group.

• 18:40

Scott, what's the thought behind that?

• 18:41

Are we supposed to go and adventure with our new group right now?

• 18:44

If we so desire?

• 18:45

If we so desire, yeah, the event ending doesn't dissolve the open party for the event.

• 18:51

The open parties have some sort of default party configurations that can't be changed.

• 18:56

So they'll be stuck with a group loot and stuff like that.

• 18:59

But we do try to encourage people to continue to stick together and play together.

• 19:03

The game is hard.

• 19:04

So it's good to play with friends.

• 19:05

I just left the raid.

• 19:06

I don't want to play with you.

• 19:07

Oh my god.

• 19:08

He's going to join the bandits.

• 19:09

I called it.

• 19:10

Yes, I'm looking for the highwaymen to help bandits.

• 19:14

Very cool.

• 19:15

Okay.

• 19:16

And then obviously we saw during the event, there are obviously multiple stages that exist.

• 19:23

Each of those stages having unique mechanics associated with them.

• 19:27

There are a lot of different types of events.

• 19:29

I mean, that you and the narrative team and Scott that you guys are working on creating,

• 19:34

each of those event types will have different similar stages.

• 19:37

Like we saw there was a trap stage here that we can set up.

• 19:40

Is it intended that these stages are going to provide players with kind of downtime to

• 19:44

recuperate and also perhaps set up and strategize how they want to address the upcoming challenge?

• 19:50

Well, I don't really know about you, but I'm, my heart's beating right now.

• 19:55

I feel like we've been challenged and of course there's going to be moments where there are

• 20:01

like less challenges which rely less on your class kit than usual.

• 20:09

But I think that in general, if you want to like really get down and understand the story

• 20:14

and appreciate the world, then probably you're going to want to focus more in the story arcs

• 20:21

where you can take things at your own pace.

• 20:25

We have some events that do other things.

• 20:27

Like there could be some that are just puzzles.

• 20:30

We have an event in here that is actually just like you can attend a funeral for just

• 20:35

an NPC that can pop up.

• 20:39

And there isn't actually any combat to do in that one.

• 20:41

Rewards are adequately scaled.

• 20:43

There are events in here that are just kind of for flavor and for fleshing out the world

• 20:46

a little bit too, that you can participate in and learn more about.

• 20:48

Yeah, I think there are going to be some moments where you might be like frustrated that an

• 20:53

event is like obscuring something that you want to get to, like a NPC that you need to

• 20:58

talk to for your quest or something.

• 21:00

So then gathering people to help you is going to be really useful.

• 21:05

Awesome.

• 21:06

Very cool.

• 21:07

And that event there at the last stage had kind of like a little mini boss dude.

• 21:12

Is that kind of a component of all events that you guys are intending to incorporate

• 21:17

or just kind of some events will have those mini bosses?

• 21:19

Some will have them.

• 21:20

There's going to be a whole lot of these and they're going to be at different tiers of

• 21:26

challenge and you know, kind of, I guess, like power level tiers.

• 21:34

You know, they're not all going to be, you know, defeating the, you know, end all dragon

• 21:40

being at the end.

• 21:41

Some are just, you know, about helping people.

• 21:43

There's some are about just building up the world of Varra, which is a very difficult

• 21:48

and challenging place as people are trying to resettle it.

• 21:52

There's all kinds of tiers for different levels of heroism.

• 21:55

From helping the small time people to downing giant foes.

• 22:00

And these are obviously a bit different than what people have seen previously with Karfen

• 22:05

where we showed off kind of the story arc system that fundamentally changes a particular

• 22:09

location or area for an extended period of time that exists within stages that are might

• 22:14

be multi days in length.

• 22:17

These are more bite size, kind of digestible, end to end, 20 minute gameplay, right?

• 22:22

Right.

• 22:23

Definitely much shorter than a story arc, which, yeah, as you mentioned before, is meant

• 22:26

to be taken kind of at a slower pace.

• 22:29

Can your individual path through the story arc is a little bit more measured, like you're

• 22:34

less reliant on like the pace of the actual story arc.

• 22:38

It's more about your own personal pace through the quests.

• 22:41

And then as the story arc advances over time, like over the course of days, then you can

• 22:47

dive back into it and get more involved in it again.

• 22:50

Very cool.

• 22:51

And then if there are people who might be problematic to a particular event, like this

• 23:00

Jindrak guy.

• 23:01

Oh, okay.

• 23:02

I think it's triggering again.

• 23:04

Like this Jindrak guy, we could like, you know, attack them or something, right?

• 23:10

We could, yes.

• 23:11

If you were aligned with the bandits, maybe.

• 23:15

And there are some events that do have you pick sides in PvP.

• 23:19

You know, whenever Steven joined this event, he had one option to just merge us into the

• 23:23

event raid group.

• 23:24

This was a PvE event, but there are going to be events with sanctioned PvP where there

• 23:30

are multiple team options to join.

• 23:33

Got it.

• 23:34

Got it.

• 23:35

Got it.

• 23:36

Got it.

• 23:37

Okay, very cool.

• 23:38

Well, I'll let Jindrak live this time.

• 23:40

Guys, that was a super exciting event showcase.

• 23:44

I know that the community loved to kind of see this stuff.

• 23:46

Obviously, events are an integral component of making the world feel kind of dynamic and

• 23:50

representative of what is happening around the area.

• 23:53

It gives people insight into particular locations and the type of activities that might be occurring,

• 24:00

but it also gives really interesting ways for us as players to interact with that environment.

• 24:04

And affect change as well and be rewarded for that activity.

• 24:09

I think it's super cool.

• 24:10

You guys did a great job with standing up the event system and populating the world

• 24:14

with really compelling activities.

• 24:15

So thank you for showing us a little bit of the work you guys have been doing towards

• 24:20

Alpha 2.

• 24:21

I know that the community loves it and we'll be back on stream to talk a little bit more

• 24:25

about this.

• 24:26

All right.

• 24:27

Thanks.

• 24:28

Thanks for having me, Steven.

• 24:29

Bye.

• 24:30

Thanks, Steven.

• 24:31

Absolutely.

• 24:32

Thanks for having me.