Ashes of Creation information

I found out that some Alpha and Beta keys are being given away on their discord.  I can generate a link for anyone interested.  Please message me on discord if you need one!

I'll post any further updates I may learn about this here!

The Kickerstarter reached goal 1 in 12 hours and they updated to show what goal 2-3 would focus on. This game is going to promise a lot and hopefully deliver everything they promise I am optimistic and hopeful!

The thing to realize about this game is its been in development for more than 4 years and has been completely funded by their own money. The Kickstarter was added so that they could increase the size of their team to bring the final product home. Alpha is tentatively scheduled for late 2018. While their scope is massive, they have a great engine that help speeds up development and saves them a lot of time having to manually code everything from scratch. the Unreal engine is widely used by a lot of different games and saves a lot of time when developing. While they are a small team now, I believe the hope is that with the kickstarter they can bulk up that team and knock their little baby out of the park. 

Now that said a few things on my watch list are:

1. With no factions how is siege combat handled? I mean if everyone is red (potential enemy) to me then how do I know who to fight in a mosh pit? How is allegiance declared so we know which side of the battlefield each warrior stands? What prevents someone from claiming loyalty getting inside then turning to the other side? And if that's a thing why have walls at all if you can just walk right in and flip sides.
2. Can guilds take ownership of objectives? How will guilds be noticed in the world.
3. Is conflict solely Guild vs Guild? or can non-guilded folk fight and defend with each other?

All of these i'll be including in my interview with Steven.

Information on siege mechanics will be very welcome (and possibly soon upcoming in one of the two yet to come remaining "Nodes" blog articles/videos).

Best guess at this stage is that they will have something similar to EVE Online - Guilds will make their own name and reputation for themselves, and friend or foe is determined by some system that allows a Guild leader to set other Guilds as friendly, hostile, or neutral.

Where Ashes looks to significantly differ from EVE, is in their "Citizenship" mechanics (where everything you do within a Node improves your standing there) - which should (in theory) encourage players to settle down within a specific Node and naturally come to think of a Node as their home, inspiring a natural loyalty towards the Node and other citizens within that Node. It's very likely that things like "throwing open the gates to the enemy" will be heavily restricted to only the highest ranking Citizens, so a spy would presumably have to devote significant time and resources into the node before earning a position high enough to sabotage a siege from the inside, and a turncoat would likewise presumably be sacrificing all the personal rank and progress achieved within the Node (and once starting over in a new Node, likely never again achieve the same position over other players who already call the Node home).

Having witnessed the politics of Eve Online, I have no doubt that there will indeed be unscrupulous players devoted enough to commit to such tasks, setting up their betrayals years in advance, for the reward of making history within the game, but hopefully it won't be made easy for them.

This is all pure speculation on my part though at this point. Looking forward to having actual answers from the developers mouths on the subject.

Well, this should push the game over the top.  How can anyone hate a game with kittens & puppies!

edit: now without broken link o.O

I am very excited about this game. The team's dedication and desire has won me over. It may be the first KS I support.

I heard kittens and puppies :3

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14luppZ3Ub8jmcw_aK65QWxYY4xa8qAo9zRfpYWBxOXE/mobilebasic

found this list of known information, don't know if it is 100% accurate and I'm sure it can all change without notice.

To answer Fog's question #1:

If they have any sense, they''ll have an NPC inside the walls that you talk to and mark yourself for Defence, and one outside the walls that you talk to and mark yourself as an Attacker. Anyone not marked for either should be subject to the usual PvP marking rules and will not count toward either side's progress. This will stop any underhanded backstabbery and will give a clear indication of who is fighting for which side, plus giving a special attacker/defender mark will mean that the usual PvP rules don't apply within that battle.

It is simple, easy, and clear.

To add to Marrra's comment, I'm watching the War Combat trailer and noticing now that the attackers are all in the SAME uniform. The way I see it then with the idea Marrra and I discussed before is like Dark Age of Camelot, maybe we are non descript and all in the same uniform with a generic 'class' name per se?

The link below is the 57 second mark showing a whole row of archers all in the same armour/tabards. Feel free to check before and after this for what I mean.

Ashes of Creation: Combat First Look (Siege Uniforms)

I jumped on to pimp another game and saw this and went and checked it out. Wow!

Like someone said, might be the first game I help fund on KS. It sounds like a perfect home for us.

Now I just have to convince the wife why funding a game that wont be out until 2018 (at best) is a great idea. But exclusive mounts and pets is always a good start. She is a sucker for fluff.

Ive fielded quite a few "thats a really expensive kickstarter for not even giving you a copy of the game"

Note: there is no up front box cost for AoC. You mearly download and subscribe. No cost for the game itself. This game is taking the "Game as a Service" seriously and plans to include future expansions in the subscription price.

Fog, would you consider AoC pretty heavy on the family's radar? I know we keep an eye on a lot, but some must pique the collective interest more than others.

While you have Stevens attention at your interview, could you ask him about:

1. If they are planning on making the game fully playable for people with disabilities, in my case colorblind. (I was never able to use many functions in gw2)
2. If they are planing to support modding, e.g. LUA Scripting.

Blackjack, this is the ONLY game on the horizon that clears the minimum requirements for our compatibility matrix. Its the closest thing that ive seen to a match for our community. If they can deliver on their vision i have no doubt were looking at chapter 6.

Id be interested to see what the  actual incentive is to push siege combat and regulate it  into a situation that doesn't simply  encourage 24 megaguild coverage to win

some games acheive this by  opening up vulnerability at certain times, increasing the spoils of war at times, making certain areas rich in particular materials, sitting  forts on entrances to dungeons, each of whcih has their own  problems  in being gamed.

The incentive would be that we can only have five active nodes in a whole server at anyone time. Some content may appear but only from a certain node, for instance, and therefore we need to wipe out one node to construct another.

I'm both liking and fearing this but that is only because I've not seen it in play or seen how long it takes to actually do the destruction aspect.

Only time will tell!

  From what they are saying, then it should take just as many resources to destroy a node as it took to build it up.  How long is harder to say, but you don't wake up one day and say lets go remove that.  From what I understand, you have to declare a siege and that has a wait timer where both sides gets to prepare for the battle.

  The siege wait timer increases with node level, I believe up to a week.

  I look forward to more game play information and videos.

I just watched the two videos about their "node" system and I thought it was very interesting.  I'm keeping an eye on this game now.

https://www.ashesofcreation.com/node-series-part-2-metropolis/

This Q&A session had some interesting tidbits: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1csRwQtj86tfuAlk8IiyuFZ873IsC9mbhPuluCDlHlQY

1. [15:30] Will AoC have Guild v. Guild declaration systems?

1. Yes
2. Not just your run of the mill wars
1. Objective based
2. Based on things those guilds may own