Talk:2018-08-17 Discord Q&A

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2:04

Steven: Those effects are hot off the press so they haven't been tuned at all really

Very dramatic.

Are you going to have a slider on the effects to show like more or less effects?

Steven: That'll be one of the settings, will be effects settings that you can adjust: Dial them down obviously; and you know that's, there's different what we call I guess channels to those effects right: Different layers by which they kind of build off of; and the setting will allow you to adjust those layers.

You should partner with Nvidea to get some physX on it.

Steven: We've definitely had Nvidia coming to us with a lot of discussions about using some of their tech, but yeah that's a interesting discussion.

3:04

If this is an early iteration like Jesus and the final plate one is just going to be just...

Steven: That's a super early iteration actually as a matter of fact. Like over the next sprint and a half so next like four weeksish, a lot of that stuff gets pulled together better. Especially from a fluidity standpoint and movement and contact, yeah. In fact the sound passes you know not present really and sound really helps when it comes to action you know the feeling of contact with an individual like hitting a target, a dodge, that kind of stuff is really important. So once that sound pass gets put in I think it'll help a lot.

3:58

Out of interest is it's soft targeting or using some sort of hit-box registry for different parts of the body?

Steven: It's using a hitbox registry that it divides into three separate locations: From the upper body, lower body and head. Right now we're using a multiplier against those different hitbox locations. So damage against the head obviously is gonna do more; and then additionally it matches the model mesh exactly on the hitbox so it's a one-to-one ratio on the on the body mesh.

4:31

Will there be like a third person to first person zooming functionality?

We don't have the first person zoom in because when you get into first person there's a different animation set required for the holding of the weapon, the hands that you see in front of you; and we don't have those animations. So we're really focusing on third person, but there will be aim down sights. You may have seen it that you can aim down sights on weapons; and there will be scopes on like crossbows and stuff that - arcane scopes - that you can use.

5:04

I didn't mean just like in the Alpha one, but would it be like in the full game on release just out of curiosity? Because the scenery looks amazing already, it'd be so nice to see in the first-person perspective.

So from, with regards to that, we do. In I think in alpha zero we did have the zoom in that you could zoom in to first-person, but you don't have like the hands in front of you and stuff. You just have the cameras perspective not seeing the character; and from the eyesight level. So that will be possible from a camera perspective.

5:36

With the potion a launcher, is the trajectory- will you be able to shoot over walls or obstacles and stuff like that?

Steven: Correct.

Yeah I noticed, I saw the potions bouncing along the floor at one point.

Steven: There's no effects in for that... Yeah they do 'bump bump bump' but they actually explode on impact as well. So if you hit the player target they explode on impact. If you don't it bounces for a little bit.

6:03

Is there ADS for spells?

Steven: Yes. Some spells do have ADS. There's a long-range meteor blast that can be used from one of the spell books; and that has an arcane zoom in. It lets you zoom into a target.

If I got a potion launcher and I like sat point-blank against a wall could I fire a potion at myself?

Steven: You could fire the potion at the wall and I think right now the functionality would have it bounce back to you; and then it would hit you and probably kill you.

6:32

I've heard a lot of people ask is there going to be combat weapons swapping?

Steven: In this iteration of alpha one that's a hundred percent action-oriented there is weapon swapping at the moment yes.

You literally see in the trailer I think where the crossbow switches to the two handed sword.

Bro that crossbow action! Oh my god rekt!

6:53

Quick question is if there is weapon swapping, will we have an additional bag space for specific set weapons?

Steven: So what were what we're wanting to do for the battlegrounds portion of the alpha one is have weapons really fill up your- have weapons. So weapons hold skills right. Right now we're tying skills into weapons. So those weapons will have skills associated with them and they'll will rest on a hot bar and you can swap between the weapons on the hot bar and that'll allow you to access the different skills. Additionally the breastplate, the leggings: Those also have skills associated with them those are more utility and defensive abilities, such as like camouflage, polymorph, battlefield wall; that kind of stuff. Those are on the armor pieces and then they are associated with right now the VC hotkeys for their abilities.

7:52

So the weapons go kind of in Guild Wars 2 style. When you swap your weapon you swap your skillset, correct?

Steven: So Guild Wars 2 yeah when you swap your weapons, it gives you a whole host of skills that changes. Right now weapons are tied to one specific skill; and you know that's just again because we're so early in alpha 1. But will probably be changing that as we continue to iterate and test.

8:16

Will there's still be class specific skills? Or do classes just not-

Steven: So class kits come into play with the castle siege mode. So when Castle sieges get implemented- which shouldn't be too far in the into the alpha-1- that's when we will implement the class structure for action combat and start playing with these class kits where you join in a particular class and you have you immediately have access to certain class specific skills. Class skills that you can predetermine as well from a host of skills to select from; and then those will be your base class skills you have access to; and then if you pick up weapons they'll augment those skills.

8:57

What will underground metro leaders get as a mount?

Steven: That's a great question. So we're looking with a few abilities to burrow. So part of that you know- as akin to flight would be for the overground nodes- the underground nodes we're looking to see if we can get monsters that we can burrow through the ground with. But I don't know if we're going to be able to achieve that.

9:40

Steven here's a side project question: You're gonna have a just themed D&D at the launch party. Will you be publishing a campaign book?

Steven: Hey I think I leaked enough today [laughter]. As soon as I got off the stream I immediately got the eyes from people. What could I do? The team was pretty happy I mean obviously they were you know they watched the stream when it was happening and they read the the comments and they were they were ecstatic to see the reception was I will be a totally transparent like I was a little nervous I think beforehand because you know when when you when you build up to show progress and while hearing the reception is something you're obviously gonna be a little nervous about but we were pretty happy too to see everybody's response was very positive.

10:43

Another question regarding the final game's land size. When you factor the land, like you know the multiple levels like normal land, underground and like I think we're gonna be like underwater in this aspect as well: How I guess big is that supposed to all be combined in a sense?

Steven: So the total playable area is estimated at this moment in time at 460 square kilometers, I believe. Which is - or no, sorry. I think it's 480: 480 square kilometers; which is which is pretty large comparatively to other MMORPGs out there. Now that does not include the lapped spaces: So that is the underrealm and the portion of the world that it encompasses, which could probably easily take up an additional hundredish square kilometers I would imagine. Obviously that's not going to be as expansive as the 480 that's above, because it's going to be broken into cavernous kind of - these large open cavernous; and then smaller caverns; so I think that's probably the estimate around a hundred additional square kilometers.

12:05

By the way Steve how is healing going to work with action combat? Is he going to be like healing tab targeting or is it going to be like combo attacks?

Steven: So we may not actually have healing available until the the castle sieges of alpha-1; at which point it will be part of the class kits; and those will include both proximity based, directional based and projectile based healing. That's going to tie into the class kits that you choose during the match.

12:47

As your node expands and becomes more intelligent will you ever be able to travel to like space or have space wars or anything?

Steven: Yes. We're preparing an entire host of spaceships that will be sellable as cosmetic items [laughter].

13:25

The early release we were told that the nodes will be locked. What does that mean they'll be locked at- there will be no camps for the early release?

Steven: Oh you mean for headstart? So for headstart, nodes will not collect experience, which means they will not progress. At level zero nodes you do not see anything in the world that represents them.

So it's gonna be a little hard to get supplies.

Agreed. You will be- it'll be just as difficult as if you were the how do you say the first people to arrive back at Verra; it will be pretty difficult.

14:28

I know you haven't talked a lot about it but are you planning on them being action-oriented or tab targeted.

Steven: For what?

Like summoners.

Steven: Oh, for Summoners. So every archetype will have a combination of action-oriented skills and Tab targetable skills; and you'll be able to customize the direction of how that archetype plays based on which you want to cater more towards.

14:59

On the topic of summoners. During sieges who controls the large mob, so when you do a group summon?

Steven: It's a very good question. That'd be the party leader.

Even if the party leader isn't a summoner?

Steven: Incorrect. In order to summon the initiate that summon, you must be a party leader. If you change the- you will not be able to then change the party leader at that point and if the party disbands the summon ends.

So you have to have a party with just summoners?

Steven: It doesn't have to be just summoners, but it has to be a party led by a summoner with other summoners in it.

What happens if you disconnect?

Steven: There's a period of time in which it does not disband the party while you're disconnected.

Would that be possible that like a party hierarchy for like guilds, so like the guild leader can be the leader, but have like a sub captain or you know that would be the summoner?

Steven: I believe the hierarchy is determined by order of invite.

And will there ever be a raid size summon?

Steven: No. No raid sized summon. I think if you guys- well when you guys- yeah. When the raid summon is seen, I think you'll understand why there won't be a raid size summon.

16:52

So how are the different types of nodes balanced?

Steven: How are they balanced? Very ornate process of a balance. They each have their strengths, right: Strengths and weaknesses. It's a matter of give-and-take. So their strengths apply to their specific aspect of what the node is about, right. So military nodes will kind of focus on the PvP and adventuring side. The Scientifics will focus on - actually I'm giving out too much information... For nodes three it's not like you know you got to think the notes three is not like I'm just like I don't feel like doing that today.

17:57

You mentioned about the potion- oh you guys do. Okay, you mention about the potion launches when it actually hits a player will just go off. Ship-to-ship combat potion launchers would that be a thing?

Steven: It might be a thing, yes. Very astute observation. The the potion launcher is, you know, as we said in the past were not really about that black powder life. Instead it's really going to be focused on the arcane arts: The elements; the use of radiance and darkness; and then those being employed in larger weaponry, such as the type of siege weaponry between ship battles as well as those and sieges. A potion launcher is an example of the arcane energies that can be mastered in order to facilitate these highly destructive alchemical blends that can be created.

18:53

Can you tell us the party sizes for the different modes?

Steven: Yes. I believe that we in the battlegrounds we're doing parties up to five; and then when we implement the guild mode it'll be parties of raids of up to 20. The castle sieges will be party sizes of five within a raid I believe; and there's five specific raids per team: Two teams; and then the party sizes in Hode mode will be up to five as well. A total of ten groups, fifty players.

I was just gonna ask, so will we essentially be able to like make multiple teams of five and then queue against each other or?

Steven: Yeah there will be an option in the lobby where you are capable of joining a guild based match that you can link parties together up to a maximum of twenty individuals, collective.

20:18

I was just curious, how does the team feel about Easter eggs?

Steven: We do like Easter eggs. I remember and in the very very very first level back, like gosh almost two years ago or something, we were playing around and one of the office jokes was if somebody didn't make it in by like 8 a.m. in the morning to work we would replace all of their background images and wallpaper with pictures of Nicolas Cage. In one of the first levels we had an area in a dungeon where when you entered the dungeon this giant party ball would drop out of the sky with Nicolas Cage's face on it... Start playing this music. It's pretty funny.

21:32

Are monsters coins still in the game?

Steven: Yes monster coins are in the game.

How are those balanced?

Steven: Well I don't think those are really about balance, right. I mean we're not balancing the coin itself. What you do is you have an encounter that gets initiated; and that encounter is run by the AI and if a individual who is not a member of the node and that the encounters been triggered for- you can take over that monster and you have incentives to accomplish certain goals, such as attacking and destroying or disabling services around and or in the node you're targeting; and then when you do that you advance your monster level as well as potentially gain cosmetic rewards. So advancing the level will grant you in further monster coin events additional skills as the monster. So the monster may have a whole host of skills that can be used by someone, but in order for them to unlock that they must be successful in previous monster coin raids. So you're highly incentivized to participate and participate well; and then again if you achieve certain things you're going to have unique cosmetics that relate to that specific monster you're taking control over. So it'll be a fairly unique cosmetic in that sense, since those aren't intended to be... very often situations.

Is there any demerit to prevent people from just throwing the fight to save their own city?

Steven: You can't participate in a monster coin event if your account is associated as a citizen of the city the event is occurring at.

23:18

Two questions: How often do world bosses show up and can you control those world bosses with monster coins?

Steven: There are three separate stages of the monster coin event; and the second stage would be dungeon boss level monsters usually a small gang of them, so multiple people can take them over. Then the largest event of the monster coin system would be equivalent of a world boss; and yes they can't be taken over.

23:47

Will there be random slot machine giveaway craps like a most other game?

Steven: Random slot machine?

RNJesus, dailies and stuff like that.

Steven: I don't think those will be RNG based. Those will be probably- you will see the reward structure for those types of quests. Will they be dailies? No they won't be in the sense of what we've experienced dailies in the past where you feel so obligated to log in and like you'll miss these things. It's more gonna be focused around like how the world is changing and how the changes in the world relate to your opportunities; and then you know if your location's gonna matter because fast travel is not a thing, where you're located at is going to determine your you know the risk versus reward opportunities that are present; and then depending on the time that those occur, so.

24:48

With the event of the monster- say your Township or your node is being attacked behind the monster coins- all the people as monsters. Will we have an option of getting back? Like if you're halfway across the world and you can't fast travel.

Steven: So the key to that scenario is is that there are notifications of when events are going to occur like that. So people do have the time to kind of make their way back. So whether it be like a siege or a triggered event against a city or like a unique dungeon opportunity; you know those types of things are going to involve notifications. Especially to the citizens of the city; where you'll be informed of an impending event. Basically it will give you time; and then and then even though there's not fast travel, there is faster travel. So you know mount ridden. There will be connection points between certain nodes via the use of like flying automated creatures that you can use. Stuff like that. It's just the the real reason between, you know, not having that fast travel is one of the biggest biggest biggest concerns of an MMO is the ability of one large group to kind of Zerg content; and the most facilitating method by which those zergs can do that is the ability to appear anywhere at any time, because they're highly organized usually. So we want them to read- we want to require that they have either forewarned intelligence of an event, there that's a strategic necessity; or that they're in the right place at the right time.

Does that means we know what the actual event is?

Steven: If possible. Some, yeah some events will not will not tell you exactly what they are. Some will.

26:38

Will there'd be a way to spectate really large battles like battles for a castle or something else?

Steven: Yeah that's definitely something that I enjoyed in Lineage 2 that they implemented; which was the ability to kind of observe through the crystal system different vantage points during sieges, if you don't necessarily want to participate, but you can watch the events unfold. It is something that I think would be interesting to implement and not very difficult, so we are looking into that.

Just be worried about people leaking information.

Steven: Yeah I mean it is it is definitely a concern in that regard. But at the same time it's like- yeah, no. I mean that's a good point. That is a good point [cross-talk]. That is that was one of the issues I did have about that system and lineage 2, was like you know certain people just have alt accounts logged in and tuned into that thing; and like they would then utilize that information. Which, I guess is you know a means of information gathering, but it's kind of maybe too easy of one. So we're - like i said we're just looking into that. I haven't decided on that yet.

28:03

Talking about Lineage 2, will there be in an auto kick feature if someone's AFK for too long?

Steven: It depends I think on the- I mean most of those auto kick features are really revolve around server capacity; and you know having a number of current users in.

They're pretty easy to circumvent really as well because you can just leave a macro something and avoid it anyway.

Steven: Dude I use to have this like... Back in the day use to have this little what are those a stupid bird like filled with liquid that would come down and hit the key every now and then. I'm not kidding you. Sometimes I would take a little toothpick and I would like hold down the W key so that I would constantly be running or something... I know in Archeage that was like the thing to do in alpha. Like everybody was in the housing. Little mirage yeah. Numlock and D, exactly... I remember, I used to pay gold to people so that I could sit down in the courthouse. I was like hey let me get that seat, here's a hundred gold.

30:33

Do you think there will be situations where large groups will just cannibalize their own faction members and then do community service to get rid of their corruption?

Steven: Well we don't have factions... There are nodes. It's a good question because a node citizenship is account bound, you know that is something that would require a considerable effort in a subscription-based game to have multiple accounts in that regard. I don't think that they could do it as effectively as they were able to in a game like Archeage, no.

31:09

I have a question regarding the names and whatnot: Is there going to be a character limit and like a reporting feature?

Steven: Mm-hmm, yeah there will be a report feature and there will be a character limit.

Well what would the reporting this I guess effect. Like Is that only for profanity based names or religious based names? Because I wouldn't want, let's say a name I think is completely normal but might be offensive to someone - I wouldn't want my name to be reported enough where I had to force change it. If that was a name I selected for my name reservation from being a Kickstarter backer.

Steven: Yeah, I mean you know this game is going to be likely- I mean it's likely going to be rated M for Mature from the ESRB. But it may be T. I mean we'll try to get T for teen but it might be probably gonna be M. But regardless of that you know I am a firm believer that you know censorship and heavy moderation is not something that should be enforced by a company so much. Give block features. Give you know functionality to where the user can kind of self-moderate ourselves to the degree they want; and allow them to utilize those features. You know, that's I mean generally that's my feeling. With regards to the character the name and reporting a name: You know I don't think- you know the reporting the name obviously if something is out of this world offensive that's obviously gonna get removed.

32:48

Well like for example when I played Go Wars 2 my one for his name was server police; and for example peer reported him because they thought he didn't like his name or thought he might have been a like a "administrator". So he got forced to change it but.

Steven: Yeah that's stupid... So there was there was- just to give an example: In Archeage there was a siege. Just before the siege was about to occur; and the opponents of my guild all mass reported my account for no reason; and the game auto-banned me, because of the mass report. So I had to email Scott Hartsman. I was like hey dude there's a siege in like two hours and we're one of the largest guilds on the server obviously and I got banned for no reason. I think was automated; and they had to manually unban my account; and the game kept auto banning me every time I would log back in. And they had to suspend the auto ban feature for the siege. Yeah that was crazy. But, no I understand what you're saying. Like that's that's dumb functionality. I think that's just laziness when it comes to these automated behavioral algorithms; and kind of tracking those kind of stuff. I think the report feature really should be used to draw a the attention of either a behavioral metric that then relays it to a GM; or to GM directly. Part of what makes MMO experiences bad in the past for me is that there was not enough dedication or commitment given by the company from a customer service / community standpoint; and they would rely too heavily on automated services. Or those individuals who are not properly sufficient to handle the large customer service needs of a game. But I intend to have active GM's and a lot of them who will be present to make common sense kind of decisions and not dumb ones, like what you just described.

Thank you for giving such an in-depth explanation. But also I have one more question regarding reporting. We're all MMORPG players right here. We know bots ruin these games. So when we report someone we think is a bot are you gonna have a system that will notify us saying that blank player got banned for botting, so we know or reports are actually effective.

StevehL Yeah. I like that I play a game called Han: Heroes of Newerth. It's like a MOBA... So anyways I they have a functionality there where you can report a player right and they do they do send you a message letting you know whether the report was successful or unsuccessful; and I think that's a cool feature. I like that because: One it incentivizes people people to report wrongdoing, you know, instead of just passing by. In fact they tried I think to give a little bit of a reward. Like if your report was successful, you'd get an in-game reward like coins. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool.

36:29

Will ship construction be a set design, or can we decide the position of the cabins and cannons on the ship?

Steven: I believe those will be joints that are present; and players can choose which joints get populated with either utility or weaponry spots.

36:49

So is there gonna be like an outlaw status that you can achieve if you like rob enough caravans; and then you can like have a bounty that other players can kill you for?

Steven: There's definitely the cat-and-mouse kind of relationship between corrupted state individuals and bounty hunter class or bounty hunter quest participants that shows like to bounty hunters where they are; and the corruption players can fight back and not gain additional corruption; and there's like rewards and quest lines associated with that. With regards to caravans: Caravans do have a tiered progress in the quest system for defending and/or raiding caravans; and whether that moves later on- now it's not planned for the initial launch because you know we do have to have some semblance of a scope, despite what it appears. But later down the road you could see some of those systems begin to progress into these kind of pseudo factions of participants: Are you more of a Raider or more of a defender or down the middle and then having specific relationships between those different people.

Alrighty thank you I love you.