Ashes of Creation

Ashes of Creation.

Ashes of Creation takes place within a medieval fantasy setting, blending imagination with cutting-edge graphics. We are putting the word massive back into massively multiplayer with unique and novel mechanics that will bring meaning to player action. Ashes of Creation will incorporate the best parts of traditional MMORPGs with innovative sandbox concepts. You will choose your fate at every opportunity. Questlines will open and close based on the interactions of the players with their world, because this is a world where choice is consequential. Monsters will roam and grow in ferocity as civilization disrupts the natural order of things. From the location of towns to the size of cities, you will determine the landscape of your world. It will be unique in culture, ecology, and economy.

Ashes of Creation is an upcoming MMORPG set in a world of high fantasy where player’s choices will shape and define the world around them.

Ashes of Creation is a unique take on the MMO experience. Our world structure is dynamic and built to react to the actions of our players. Cities will rise and fall, their populations based on the history of the world as the players create it. Quests will unlock as these populations gather, their needs grow, and secrets are unlocked. As the world’s NPC structure is established in real time, players will have the ability to destroy what they’ve created, paving the way for new development, new populations, and real change. Political strife and intrigue will play a very real role in the structure of your world. Gone are the days of static worlds, change is here to stay.

• The original code-name for Ashes of Creation was The World of Origins.

• The developers are hoping for over a million concurrent users at launch.

Alpha-2 testing phases.

Alpha Two starts on Friday, October 25th 2024! We have not announced specific dates or testing schedules [for] Beta One, or Beta Two yet.

The Ashes of Creation release schedule is subject to change.

We obviously have PI joining us in testing, but we need more testers, so we are going to be starting to expand that. We're going to do a slow rollout of what that expansion looks like; and so for these initial testing we are going to be starting to add some of the Alpha-1 users. Now, how we're going to pick that? I know that's going to be a big contentious thing, but we are definitely going to do our best; and so the first thing that we want to do for this first round is we're going to add the top 500 from the Alpha-1 contributors. So, that is looking at people who actually participated in game in Alpha-1. We are going to be grabbing those users and then we're going to have another 500 that will be randomly chosen. You guys will all be emailed- the goal is to email you within this July timeframe. – Margaret Krohn

Phase	Release	Estimated/Actual date
Pre‑alpha	Alpha-0.	December 15, 2017.
APOC	Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale stress test (NDA).	September 7, 2018.
	Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale stress test (NDA lifted).	October 19, 2018.
	Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale open beta.	December 18, 2018.
	Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale early access.	September 24, 2019.
	Ashes of Creation Apocalypse castle siege mode PI closed testing.	December 19, 2019.
	Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale testing ends.	March 10, 2020.
Alpha	Alpha-1 early preview livestream.	March 27, 2020.
	Alpha-1 limited QA testing (NDA).	May 28, 2020.
	Alpha-1 preview pre-test 1 (NDA).	Dec 18 - Dec 21 2020.
	Alpha-1 preview pre-test 2 (NDA).	Feb 19 - Feb 22 2021.
	Alpha-1 preview intermittent spot testing (NDA).	Mar 19 - Jul 9 2021.
	Alpha-1 preview weekend (no NDA).	July 9 - July 11 2021.
	Alpha-1 (no NDA).	July 14 - August 15 2021.
	Alpha-2 spot testing (NDA).	November 2023.
	Alpha-2 phase-1 (No NDA).	October 25, 2024.
	Alpha-2 phase-2 (No NDA).	December 20, 2024.
	Alpha-2 phase-3 (No NDA).	May 1, 2025.
Beta	Beta-1.	To be announced.
	Beta-2.	To be announced.
Pre‑release	Head start for crowdfunding backers at the Founder level and above.	1-2 days before launch.
Release	Launch (live) release.	To be announced.
Post‑launch	Major releases (DLC expansions).	Quarterly or six-monthly.
	Minor releases.	Monthly.

Design

In order for sandbox mechanics to mean something, there must be curated content to accompany the player’s choices. Which means, as the developers, we must create that Themebox style content but for every possible path the community may take. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation is a PvX game built on the foundational principle of risk versus reward. The developers may seek feedback and make changes to portions of the game, but the core design pillars of the game will never be changed.

We will refine systems, we will iterate on systems, but we will never change the core identity of the intent and philosophical approach to what Ashes of Creation as an MMO brings to the MMO genre space... What we want to do is express that Ashes of Creation is endeavoring to build a risk-versus-reward centric PvX style game. And that intent and purpose will be delivered upon, and it will not change. – Steven Sharif

• Ashes of Creation is referred to by the developers as a "themebox" or "sandpark" game as they aim to create a reactive player-driven world accompanied by curated content.

When it comes to how MMO’s have been traditionally designed, most gamers are familiar with two distinct types of gameplay loops: the “theme park”, and the “sandbox”. The vast majority of MMO’s we’ve all seen come and go in the gaming industry have been of the theme park variety – these games put the player onto a specific path, guiding them along, with plenty of pretty sights in between the same old quest hubs, very little in divergent paths, virtually no freedom in player progression. Recently the MMO genre has seen some games of the sandbox nature come onto the scene, but despite the ultimate freedom the sandbox affords players, many are left wanting more, as there is by definition no pre built world content, no human touch, just the vastness of the “sand” for lack of a better term. Thus many MMO players often find themselves caught between the repetitive rock of the theme park or the vast dead spaces of the sandbox’s hard place. This chasm between the state of MMO gameplay loops is where we intend to inject Ashes of Creation’s Node system.

Q: How do you go about designing some of the more old school systems such as XP debt, minimal fast travel, and open world raiding that have really gone away for the most part in modern MMOs?

A: When looking at the reasoning behind why some of those old systems existed, a lot of it was centralized around the idea of risk versus reward. I mean, let's take a look at the three that you name, XP debt, minimal fast travel, and open world raiding. Experience debt is a cost of failure. Experience debt is the bite of not achieving success. If I die to a monster because my strategy was bad, because my performance was bad, because my planning was bad: all of that means that debt is the cost I pay for the bad choice... Minimal fast travel: My location matters; and the time it travels there is the cost I pay. Open world raiding: I'm not the only person interested in completing this objective. I have competition. That competition represents pressure. That pressure represents a desire to succeed and perform. All of those are touch points on player emotional connectivity. There is a reason why I want to succeed: Part of that reason can be incentivization through reward; part of that reason can be distance; it can be incentivization through failure. So that I think are one of the core fundamental philosophies as to how you design some of the more old-school systems. – Steven Sharif

Design pillars

The design of Ashes of Creation adheres to five main pillars.

1. Engaging and immersive story
2. Reactive world
3. Player interaction
4. Player agency
5. Risk vs reward

In designing Ashes of Creation, we adhere every detail to five main pillars: Engaging and Immersive Story, a Reactive World, Player Interaction, Player Agency, and Risk vs Reward. Even in the environment, everything you as the player do will tie into these pillars, while everything your guild does, everything your server does will ultimately keep the world fresh, ever-changing, and most importantly... exciting.

Inspiration

Ashes of Creation has taken inspiration from various other MMORPG titles.

In terms of what came before, we're trying to figure out who did what best and take inspiration from that: Move the genre forward; keep things updated and bring it into the 21st century. – Jeffrey Bard

• Eve Online with its regionalized economy and risk vs reward in transportation.
• ArcheAge with its building systems, transportation and naval combat.
• Star Wars Galaxies with its crafting systems.
• Lineage II with its risk vs reward, castle sieges, flagging, open world PvP and guild progression.

A lot of the systems in Lineage 2 were based around a concept that got lost today in mmorpgs, and that's risk versus reward. You know this idea that the more you risk the greater potential reward should be present is a complete paradigm shift away from everyone's a winner, everybody gets a participation reward, and here you go, congratulations you're a player in this game; and that's boring. It gives nothing for a person to aspire to achieve something, or to feel the bite of loss when you fail. Those are the driving forces of why people want to play games and it's a reason why new games when they come out have such a short lifespan, because they are always competing with WOW. You don't have to compete with WOW. You don't have to be a WOW killer. You can focus on something that is different from a philosophical design standpoint; and I think that's just what a lot of studios today don't want to take the risk on. – Steven Sharif

• The design of the Bard archetype took inspiration from elements of Lineage II, ArcheAge, and World of Warcraft.

We had tons of different inspirations, obviously the Lineage/Archeage Swordsinger/Blade Dancers I believe, but then from other MMOS as well, like some concepts from WoW we really gravitated towards. – John Collins

Scope creep

I have a very very very clear vision of all of the systems designs mechanics that are present within the game and we're sticking to that vision and we're not adding additional features and prolonging the development due to that scope creep. – Steven Sharif

Nodes

Alpha-2 Village node flythrough.

Nodes are a pre-set location, wrapped in a zone of influence, in our world that can form into towns of different sizes. These sizes range from a small camp to a sprawling metropolis. The size of the towns depends on the contribution by players and how far they’ve advanced the Node. Players do not create the footprint of a Node, but within that footprint they do have the ability to own land. Players who are part of the government for a specific Node will have the ability to modify building types and services further, but for the most part, a Node will grow along its own specific path (think about this more as NPCs building these towns out, rather than PCs individually putting buildings and walls up). A Node’s contribution area is larger than the actual town itself, allowing for players to adventure while building upon the town. We call the contribution area the Node’s “Zone of Influence,” and it’s the area where players help to advance the Node they are in.

Winstead Village (stage 3) node on Alpha island. Alpha-1 screenshot.

Encompassing each server realm are carefully placed points of development called Nodes. There will be 85 regular node locations at launch with 15 additional castle nodes (5 castles x 3 castle nodes each) for a total of 100 nodes.

• Previously the developers estimated 103 regular node locations with 15 additional castle nodes for a total of 118 nodes.
  • This decrease in node count does not affect the amount of available player housing, or the estimated server capacity.

We have moved from a 103 nodes to 85 nodes; and there's a few reasons for that. One, when we were doing the calculations behind how- in Alpha 2 and in the game- we want these vassal structures to exist, we had more nodes than what felt meaningful and we wanted to condense some of that those curated story arcs and hooks into the environment and realm around the areas to be more bountiful at a lesser node value: meaning bringing down the node count so that we can increase the richness of each of those nodes more than what was at 103. – Steven Sharif

• There were 9 node locations in Alpha-1.
• Node locations are subject to change prior to Beta-1.
• Nodes have emblems that can be placed on flags and certain types of armor.

Nodes are the heart of the world, they create the ebb and flow of life. At their core, Nodes are pre-set points in the world, wrapped in a Zone of Influence and surrounded by geographic areas that change over time based upon player participation. The world map is divided into regions, with each region containing multiple Nodes. As a Node advances, it influences the types of content within itself and the surrounding areas. Players do not create Nodes, but if they are a part of the government for a specific Node, they have the ability to influence diplomacy, and modify building types/construction and services within that Node. – Margaret Krohn

Pre-alpha Metropolis node.

Nodes exist all throughout the world and the location of said node will determine its type; but this type will be... seen at the first stage of development when the first stage when a node propagates real-time assets in the world; is basically these NPCs, these merchants that come into an area and they offer services and/or of stores or whatever the deal may be. You will see the flavor of the node from those merchants. So if it's a military node you'll see military people. If it's... an economic node you'll see merchants. If it's a scientific one you'll see scholars; and if it's a divine one you'll see priests and clerics. So players will have a very firm understanding of which node is which type in order to know how they want to progress. – Steven Sharif

Nodes are assigned one of four (4) node types, each of which contain unique specializations.

• Players will be able to identify the type of a node at its first stage of development (Expedition) based on its NPC population.

Node type.	Specialization.	NPCs.	Currency.
Divine nodes	Faith and skill/equipment augment focuses	Priests	Favor
Economic nodes	Trade and merchant focuses	Merchants	-
Military nodes	Combat and class training focuses	Guards	Honor
Academic nodes	Artisan and construction focuses	Scholars	-

Ashes of Creation allows you, the player, to decide the fate of the world around you. With each Node Type, you can change the flow of resources and goods in the world. Will you grow the largest Economic Metropolis and help guide the riches of Verra, or will you choose another path unlocking new stories filled with allies and enemies?

Node types are predetermined and are the same across all server realms.

• A node’s type is static. It does not change based on the node’s advancement or destruction.

For example, if a level 4 Scientific Node is destroyed, it will become a Level 0 Scientific Node. It will never be any other Node Type other than a Scientific Node. The location of these Types relates to the influences of the area around the Node. – Margaret Krohn

Node types affect various services and systems at each level of node advancement.

• Node leadership
• Narrative
• NPCs
• Node buildings and amenities

Node types will be definitive during the Beta testing stages.

Beta testing will require that the node types be definitive; and that's because of how node types are integrated into the relating and corresponding neighboring points of interest and those quest lines. So it's not something we can swap very easily. – Steven Sharif

Node stages

Illustration of node advancement from Wilderness (stage 0) to Metropolis (stage 6).

Nodes advance by collecting experience from the actions of players nearby. As players complete content inside of a Node’s Zone of Influence (the area around the node), they contribute that experience toward the Node’s development. The experience given to the Node may then be modified based on certain Events and Accomplishments. When a Node reaches the experience required, it undergoes the process of advancing to the next stage. There are a few exceptions where a Node cannot advance even though it has the required experience - most commonly, a Node can not advance if a Node is a Vassal of another Node and would advance to the same stage as its Parent Node. – Margaret Krohn

Nodes have seven (7) stages of advancement, with experience thresholds for each stage. When a Node reaches the experience required for its current stage, it advances to the next stage.

	Node stage.	Symbol	Alternate name.	Timeframe to advance.	Player housing.
0.	Wilderness			-
1.	Expedition		Crossroads	Few hours	-
2.	Encampment		Camp	Many hours	-
3.	Village		-	Few days	Small houses
4.	Town		-	Many days	Medium houses
5.	City		-	Few weeks	Large houses
6.	Metropolis		Metro	Many weeks	Mansions

Node advancement

Alpha-2 node leveling countdown.

Citizen and non-citizen player activity (questing, gathering, raiding, etc.) within a node's ZOI counts toward that particular node's advancement (progression) to a higher node stage.

The advancement of a node unlocks its unique content, which comes at the cost of locking out an increasing ring of neighboring nodes from progressing to the next stage.

• Nodes advance to the first stage quickly. This enables NPC services such as vending or banking items.
• The more advanced the node is, the larger its ZOI becomes.
• Less advanced nodes (referred to as vassal nodes) that fall within a more advanced node's ZOI can still gain XP, but must remain at a lower advancement stage than the dominant node.
  • The vassal system begins when a node hits Village (stage 3), but neighboring nodes starting from Expedition (stage 1) also block the growth of their immediate neighbors.
• Certain quests, such as story arcs, may not be able to be turned in after a node has advanced.
• The territory expansion algorithm takes into account the nearest coast, neighboring nodes, and the heatmap of players in surrounding areas over the last weeks or month.
  • Due to the way the progression algorithm calculates territorial (ZOI) expansion during node advancement, there is a small possibility that two nodes of the same stage end up being close to each other.

The way that the algorithm expands the territories takes into account a few things: One it takes into account the coast like where's the closest coast. Two it takes into account the neighboring nodes so it can take over and essentially vassal state those nodes, but what's more important is essentially the initial population based on like how players choose their races. Because we have nine different races and four different starting points that branch out, each server's population density is going to dictate essentially the first few nodes that are highly populated and then that initial seed is what's going to determine the node structure as it moves inland into the into the world essentially; and based on the performance and successes of different sieges will determine which nodes that got locked out from the previous the initial advancements what nodes can now be available to advance further. So I really think that with so many variables that are present in the equation of how nodes advance and stay existing with the more variables you have, the higher likelihood there is for there to be a significant diversion in world progression. – Steven Sharif

Normally the algorithm that's applied to the node territorial expansion will prevent significant nodes from being in close proximity to each other... There could be a perfect storm where all of the algorithmic progression of territory leads to having these nodes very close to each other because there's certain requirements that should that need to be available to satisfy node vassal takeovers; and it's possible that two nodes would never take each other over as vassals and end up close together and spanning their territories in opposite directions: The Tale of Two Cities thing. – Steven Sharif

• A node does not receive XP from the nodes within its ZOI until these nodes have reached their cap.

• Citizens of one node can contribute to the advancement of other nodes.

• Node experience gain opportunities will be equitable across the four node types.
  • The exact percentage of advancement from obtaining items or killing monsters is not going to be explicitly known to avoid "gaming" the system.

Different people have different resources invested in nodes progressing and it would be a little "gamey" if you could know exactly what was necessary at that point because that would disincentivize people from participating. – Steven Sharif

Node advancement spawns a series of animations and visual effects (within the footprint of the node).

• Players within the node are teleported to a safe location, likely a respawn area near the node.
• Supplies will spawn around the node and system driven caravans are spawned to bring these supplies into the node. These caravans are not able to be attacked.
• NPCs will begin construction activities.
• Players outside the node will see the new facade of the node pop into existence as the node advances in stage.

The Development Area of a Node is where civilization will appear as the Node advances. As the Node Stage increases, different buildings, NPCs, and services will become available in the Development Area. The higher the Node Stage, the more complex and populated the Development Area becomes. Development Areas will also vary depending on the Node Type - Economic, Military, Scientific, or Divine. – Margaret Krohn

Node sieges

Node sieges (Pre-alpha footage).

As some areas in the world grow, others will fall. This is the foundation of the living, breathing world that is Ashes of Creation, where players will have the ability to make important decisions that matter in the longevity of an area becoming a city, or whether to siege a rival town. Rise above the ashes, create the world around you, and be a part of the story that unfolds because of your actions and decisions. – Margaret Krohn

Node sieges enable players to destroy nodes starting at Village (stage 3). This paves the way for new development and access to the locked content in surrounding nodes. Due to this dynamic, political strife and intrigue play an important role in the structure of the world.

• Sieging nodes will not be an easy task for the attackers. Cities and metropolises will have a considerable defensive advantage.

• There will be systems that mimic some of the mechanics of sieges, but there won't be practice sieges.

• Death penalties do not apply to objective-based events such as node sieges.

If you own a home in a node and you don't want to see that home destroyed, you need to defend that city! – Steven Sharif

• The majority (~80%) of content in Ashes of Creation is open-world but there may be instanced battles within castle and node sieges where specific groups can participate in small, short-duration objective-based battles for specific waypoints.

Read more...

Combat

PvP combat gameplay in Alpha-1 castle sieges.

Combat is the most tactile system in the game. It's the thing you will experience most often; and outside of the systems and mechanics that are going to be present for the overarching core gameplay loop, combat needs to feel responsive. It needs to not feel floaty. It needs to feel mobile. It needs to be fluid. It needs to give a feeling of satisfaction. The audio components, the effects components, the animations themselves, the types of skills and those types of things: All of those are really our objective in fine-tuning the approach for our combat in Ashes of Creation. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-2 solo PvE ranger combat.

Combat in Ashes of Creation is focused on strategy and tactics.

• Combat is the most tactile system in the game. It needs to feel responsive, mobile and fluid. It needs to give a feeling of satisfaction.

We will continue to iterate on combat until it is in a place that collectively we as a community can say 'this may not be my particular combat, but this combat is good.' That is the driving force and factor behind the development of combat; and that is how we are going to continue to iterate upon it, utilizing of course the player feedback from our community, but also keeping you guys informed and up to date as we continually iterate on combat. – Steven Sharif

• Combat is animation-driven to ensure it is impactful and responsive.
  • VFX and sound effects are an important part of selling the weight and immersion of combat.
  • Camera effects such as screen shake and radial blur are used to "sell a lot of the weight without being too over the top".

I think one of the things that helps set Ashes apart from an effects perspective is that we want VFX to be dynamically generated. We want them to interact with the world. We want them to feel like they are part of the combat. – John Kent

We're building a singular tool that all of the teams can use to build abilities and tweak their sound effects, visual effects, animation design, engineering: All using the same tool grounded in animation to build these abilities. – Keenan Reimer

A revamped combat system will be rolled out during and post Alpha-1 testing.

• Alpha-1 combat was focused on core functionality rather than combat balance.
• Alpha-2 combat will include archetypes, significant ability support, augments, split-body combat, weapon attacks, and many additional items, among other things.
• The developers will be testing whether or not to use global cooldowns GCDs on different types of abilities during Alpha-2.

• The game isn't focused around cover-based combat mechanics.

I might be on a rampart or behind a wall and that could be destroyed removing my cover, but not like a Gears of War or something, where I slide up to a piece of rock, or the corner of a wall or something. – Steven Sharif

Read more...

Hybrid combat

Ranger hybrid combat in Alpha-2.

Our desire has always and continues to be how we can create a mixture of tab target abilities and skill-shot oriented positional, directional-based ability usage and make something cohesive in that design. And I think that what we're achieving with that regard may not fully feel like an action-oriented game, but we've always intended to be more hybrid-oriented, leaning towards tab target. So you're going to see a mixture of abilities that require the targets and that don't; and then you're going to have an option as the player's perspective to utilize an action camera mode, which utilizes a soft target lock feature and our reticle. – Steven Sharif

Hard-locked friendly player target.

Hybrid combat refers to the choice between tab and action combat in Ashes of Creation. A toggle button (default Z, but can be re-bound to another key) allows the player to switch between action and tab combat modes.

• The action mode camera is tied to the to the player's reticle (crosshair).
  • There will likely be a hotkey that when held down will allow free camera movement in action mode.
  • In future the user will have the ability to choose from different reticle appearances.

• Targeted skills require either a soft or hard locked target.
  • Soft locking is when the reticle moves over a valid target while in action mode. The targeting plate will appear slightly grayed out to indicate that this is a soft-lock target. If the reticle moves away from the target or the target moves away from the reticle, the target is lost.
  • Hard locking is when the player uses right-mouse on a soft-locked target in action mode, or when the player selects a valid target in tab mode. The targeting plate will not be grayed-out to indicate that a hard-lock target is selected. Unlike soft locking, if the target moves out of the reticle, the target is not lost. Tab will still cycle between hard-locked targets in action mode based on proximity priority.

• Templated skills allow "blind firing" without a target while in action mode. If an entity moves into the path of the attack they can be struck.

Q: Is the development team moving away from action combat, or is action combat more prevalent with the melee classes, and the healing/range classes are more tab-target other than AoE spells?

A: We have not moved away from our hybrid approach to the development of Ashes of Creation's combat; and specifically to reiterate: that approach is incorporating elements of skill shots, fast and reactive gameplay that is situationally relevant, and incorporates the camera mode of both tab-targeting as well as action combat reticle. That's something that is still in progress. We haven't moved away from that however. To note, our approach of that hybridization is going to incorporate things like templated skill-shots, directionally relevant activated abilities, along with the ability to dodge to roll projectiles that can impact collision. Those are elements of action combat that are present. – Steven Sharif

Templated and targeted versions of skills will have different characteristics.

Skill progressions, skill point allocation is determined by the player. The player will be able to choose either more tab-target oriented skills or more action-based skills and customize their playable experience to what accommodates their preference. From a balancing standpoint for us developers, we need to make sure that certain abilities house certain functions so that there's a balance between skill shots and tab-target abilities. – Steven Sharif

• Targeted skills will be greyed out if the target is not within a valid range but templated skills will generally require the player to assess the correct range for the skill.

• Different ranks of the same skill can change the skill from tab to action or vice-versa.
  • Variables will change based on which version of a skill is chosen.
    • Damage.
    • Charge up time.
    • Accuracy.
    • Evasion.
    • Crowd control.
    • Cooldown.
    • Energy consumption.
    • Cost to spec.
    • Attack range will likely remain the same; as it is driven by the weapon or skill itself.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• It may not be possible to be able to fully spec into just action or tab targeted skills. There might be a 75% cap on choosing skills from any one type.

PvX

We like to really refer to ourselves as a PvX game, because in those systems of PvP, PvE, crafting they're all intertwined: They're interdependent on each other... Our system of development really requires some interdependence there between those things. You're going to need a crafter to give you the best items. You're going to need PvPers to secure cities and castles. You're gonna need PvErs to take down those world bosses for those materials to craft. – Steven Sharif

Ashes is a comprehensive game. It is not a PvP focused or a PvE focused, it is a comprehensive PvX game and as a result these systems are all interconnected and have to coexist with one another with certain types of mechanisms that can provide that give and take, that push and shove. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation is a PvX game. Players will naturally encounter both PvP and PvE elements. It is unlikely that a player could purely focus on just PvP or just PvE.

Ashes is a PvX game; and so in that regard, your ability to wholesale disconnect from the PvP elements of the game are likely not going to be entirely successful. Now, does that mean that you can reduce your exposure to PvP? A hundred percent; and there are multiple play paths and progression points that players can elect instead to be more PvE focused, but by the sheer nature of risk-versus-reward, and risk including not being able to predict how other players might impact your gameplay, that is an element of the innate risk that exists in the multiplayer environment of a PvX setting. So, not everybody is going to like that and we accept that; and we're not trying to build a game that everybody is going to like, because everybody it's doing that is not going to be successful, because there're just people with different interests; and you know we accept that and we're very on the nose about what we're trying to achieve. The idea is not to create a gank fest, is not to create a grief fest. That is not what PvX is; and so because of that we have certain mechanisms and systems that govern the way players engage in PvP and the majority of those are opt-in, but there is always that element of risk that's governed by the flagging system. And so, if you're interested in that I would take a look at the Wiki and look up what flagging is, and look up what corruption is. My experience tells me- and my expectations of the system are that they will signal significantly reduce a player's exposure to non-consensual PvP, but that risk is always going to be present to some degree. – Steven Sharif

• A defining principle of Ashes of Creation as a PvX game is that PvE builds the world, and PvP changes the world.

• Around 80% of the content is open-world, where healthy competition is an instigator for player friction; for potential cooperation; for the ability to yield alliances; and the political theater that comes with it. This is an intended part of the PvX game design.

• There won't be separate PvE and PvP server realms but some servers may be more PvP focused than others.

• All stats relate to a player's combat effectiveness in PvX.

We're very clear with our objective and philosophy on the game and we understand that they may not appeal to everybody. But it is an important reciprocal relationship between the content that's related to PvE and the content that's related to PvP and they feed off of each other. They're catalysts for change: Their progression, their development. It's things that people can value when they see something earned and they see something lost. That elicits an emotional response from the player: That they've invested time in to either succeed or fail; and PvP allows for that element to be introduced into gameplay. And we're very clear that is our objective: That risk versus reward relationship, that achievement-based mentality. Not everybody's going to be a winner and that's okay. – Steven Sharif

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• There will not be different PvP and PvE gear types.

Open world

Alpha-1 open world dungeon entrance.

80% of the content that will exist in Ashes of Creation is open-world and there's a specific reason for that. So because of the way that friendships and or enemies are forged in the game and people have the opportunity to create their own friends or foes. We want that to play out from a contesting standpoint as well. So a lot of these hunting grounds or raid bosses that people are going to have opportunities to kill, they're going to be essentially contested potentially by your your enemies that you've created in the game or you can work together to create alliances in order to defend those contested zones. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation will be a seamless open-world experience.

• No loading time or loading screens between regions.

There will be an approximately 80/20 split between open world vs instanced encounters.

• Around 80% of the content is open-world, where healthy competition is an instigator for player friction; for potential cooperation; for the ability to yield alliances; and the political theater that comes with it. This is an intended part of the PvX design of Ashes of Creation.

In situations where we want to contain a particular type of raid, we will utilize instancing; and that can protect certain engagements with certain bosses. But that's really more on the 20% of the scenarios will have instancing protection like that. Around 80% of the content is open-world, where competition is- healthy competition is an instigator for soft player friction; for potential cooperation; for the ability to yield alliances; and the political theater that comes with it. So that's an intended part of the PvX design of Ashes. It's a core philosophical point. And just to be clear, that is not for everyone. We are not trying to make a product that appeals to every MMO gamer. That's impossible; and so we've been very upfront and forthright with what we are trying to accomplish and what our core pillars of philosophical design are. – Steven Sharif

• Castle and node sieges may contain instanced locations where specific groups can participate in certain objective-based waypoints.
• Dungeons and raids will maintain an open world feel while also capitalizing on the benefits of instanced mechanics. Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal. Outside of these and arenas there will not be too much instancing anywhere else.

There will be some open dungeons that have bosses at the end of the dungeons. There will be some open dungeons that just have a multitude of dungeon bosses, not necessarily world raids or something; and there will be lots of different rooms and they'll be progressive in the sense that in the earlier parts of the dungeon they'll be lower level and then at the later parts of the dungeons deeper down they'll be higher level and more difficult; and that creates again I think an ecosystem of where players across a multitude of levels have an opportunity to coexist within certain areas of the world; and that's good from a social dynamic. It's good from a recruitment dynamic. It's good from just a liveliness and relevance of particular areas. So that you don't end up with these locations that once you pass a certain level like it's empty. – Steven Sharif

• There was no instancing in Alpha-1.

We're probably going to do instancing only in certain dungeons and in arenas. You probably won't see instancing too much anywhere else. What you see is gonna be what you get. – Jeffrey Bard

The PvP flagging and corruption system is in place to safeguard against griefing without limiting opportunities for open conflict.

• Healthy competition is seen as an instigator for player friction; for potential cooperation; for the ability to yield alliances; and the political theater that comes with it. This is an intended part of the PvX design of Ashes of Creation.
• This friction presents an opportunity to engage in the political aspects of the game, which is the lifeblood of what keeps players interested and invested in the game.

Q: When you reach the bosses in [open world] dungeons can you be jumped?

A: For the most part if there are bosses at the end of dungeons, it is possible for you to get jumped. – Steven Sharif

Q: In an open world dungeon, what prevents others from just waiting until you're at the boss and then killing you and taking your boss's loot? What prevents mega guilds from just owning an area and preventing you from accessing or enjoying it?

A: In a majority of cases, we do not want to prevent another group from engaging potentially in PvP. We disincentivize it by creating safeguards within the flagging system that make that decision very concerning for the people that might go corrupt; and if you're in the large enough group of numbers I doubt you're going to experience that unless there's some rivalry between guilds. In which case there's apparatuses like Guild Wars that are more opt-in. You can drop guild tag if you want. But anyways, the competitive nature of this environment is a PvX element. – Steven Sharif

PvE

Alpha-1 Elder Dragon of the Tundra raid boss.

The environment in Ashes of Creation is a visually stunning realm, with fantastical beasts and creations designed to both inspire awe and instill fear. The world is harsh and unforgiving, presenting a clear and present danger to the players. Dungeons, demons and dragons, oh MY! Our unique and adaptive AI means that an encounter with similar creatures will yield a completely different experience to adapt to as a player. Keeping you on your toes for constantly changing responses from your adversary. The world awaits its heroes.

Elder Dragon of the Wood raid boss gameplay.

Whenever you have a player versus environment setting you don't want a stagnant overly repetitive because its lackluster. It does not have that a component that engages. – Steven Sharif

The Node system facilitates the generation of new PvE content such as Quests, Dungeons, Raids and Monster coins.

There is going to be a lot of PvE content for all portions of the playerbase... Part of that risk versus reward: Your risk is your time you're putting in to having a chance at getting the reward and successfully completing; and that should feel good based on how much time you devote. Now I know that there's a spectrum of casual and hard-core players in the time there, what we can do, but that's why we have many different content paths that play towards how you affect the world around you. – Steven Sharif

PvE content adapts to the development of the world to avoid repetition.

PvE difficulty

Tumok the Wretched Alpha-2 world boss.

Raid bosses are aware of the number of combatants within an area in proximity to them and that awareness is part of an indicator to which behaviors they're going to utilize as part of their behavior tree. So as it's assessing the types of combatants that are facing it, the number of those combatants, the position of those combatants, the abilities and totals of those combatants, it weighs certain actions in its behavior tree and then it acts on those actions; and in the scenario where you're bringing overwhelming odds to a particular fight, that might weigh heavier the AoE options that the boss has access to, where they're utilizing a lot more AoE abilities during an engagement due to that overage of players. So in that sense it's a bit adaptive. It's a bit dynamic based on the encounter scenario. – Steven Sharif

The difficulty of PvE content, such as raids and dungeons, will adapt based on the number of participants and their performance against that and previous bosses in that encounter. This applies to both instanced and open-world encounters.

• Bosses and mobs can dynamically adapt to the number and types of combatants in proximity to the encounter.
  • Higher performance in earlier phases will increase the difficulty of subsequent phases of the encounter.
  • Certain AI behaviors, such as AoE effects, might activate based on progress within an encounter.

How does the state tree of the NPC respond to the actions of the players? Well, it weights certain actions and behaviors based off of what the players are doing and as it weights those things, it makes decisions that will be unique according to the encounter that's occurring in front of it. So, each time might be different as a result of that. That's one section. In addition, when we talk about the adaptive scaling- this isn't scaling in like power relation to the level of the player- this is scaling in the quantity of participants; and that means that it starts to weight the behaviors that include AoE actions higher than others as a result of the number of players who are present. This intrinsically increases the challenge rating of the encounter, because those AoE abilities are providing a higher return on DPS overall to the to the raid encounter for the monster. – Steven Sharif

• There will be mobs who's level is above the player level cap.

Both in Alpha-2 and when the game launches, there will be monsters whose technical level is above that of the cap; and the intent there is obviously again to provide some level of challenge that exceeds a comparable level challenge rating. – Steven Sharif

• The higher the difficulty, the better the loot tables will be.

Q: How challenging will raid boss mechanics be given the given that players may need to simultaneously fight other players while also fighting the boss?

A: It depends. The great thing about our encounter system is that it has a wide scalability from encounters that some might consider easy given their composition to encounters that some might consider impossible until they get their gear level to a certain stage. The level of interaction with other players is really predicated on the encounter itself. We may have some encounters that are in instances although the predominant portion of those will be in the open world, in which case they do have the potential being contested; and these encounters, especially the big ones that might land in contention, are giving some of the best-in-slot gear you can get in the game. So it's important that they are contested because it is a significant victory point; and one of our core pillars is risk versus reward: and the higher that risk the higher that reward should be. So those two things seem fitting and then in addition we do have the concept of winners and losers. Not everybody in Ashes of Creation is going to be a winner; and that sucks if you're not I guess, but there is opportunity for you to continue to excel and become one. But it gives much more meaning to an achievement when not everybody gets the achievement. That's our philosophy. – Steven Sharif

Q: So it's the sort of thing where it might be, we're going do a dungeon that's oops, all fire golems, so if everybody straps up with plate armor and fire resistance, you don't have to worry about the magic fire: you've got the fire resistance for. And when you start getting punched around, that's why everyone's come in with plate?

A: The encounters design team presents a particular type of challenge rating- for those you're familiar with playing DnD or whatever, challenge rating gets informed by a few different vertical power levels, but then there's also the horizontal perspective: That is, what tools does your party have to address the challenge rating of the situation and some of the horizontal progression exists within how you kit your equipment slots. Some of those can be enhancements or stones, as you're discussing with fire resistance. Some of those are base stats that exist on a particular item, such as physical damage mitigation versus magical damage mitigation and what subtype of damage is incoming based on that. These are the ways that we emphasize that more rock-paper-scissors type of interaction with balance to where it's okay to have asymmetric imbalance if there are horizontal methods by which you achieve the challenge rating. – Steven Sharif

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PvP

PvP combat gameplay in Alpha-1 castle sieges.

Alpha-2 open world caravan PvP.

Player combat in Ashes of Creation is both vast and intimate. It spans many aspects of the game itself. From great political battles held on the fields of massive castles, to open world conflicts fought for the pride of Guild Leaders. A player can choose to participate in the fate of the world by swaying the tide of battle with his or her combat prowess. Our PvP mechanics follow a flagging system, as well as static PvP zones at certain points of interest; fight for control over cities, castles, caravans, or hunting grounds. Our PvP is designed to offer the players a well-balanced and fair world to shape through the pen, or sword should they choose.

PvP (Player versus player combat) is the catalyst for change in Ashes of Creation. Player combat is intended to be meaningful, ranging from Caravan battles to vast open world conflicts fought for the pride of Kings and Queens.

Because players are motivated by different things, because they want something from the game that other players don't want, that's going to cause people to butt heads. Different players are going to want different experiences and the conflict between the two of them will create a bigger and better thing. Out of strife comes rebirth and that's a core symbol, it's a core theme that occurs throughout the game. – Jeffrey Bard

• The majority of players will experience PvP through opt-in objective-based battlegrounds. These are high risk and high reward encounters that do not utilize the corruption system.
  • Sieges.
  • Caravans.
  • Guild wars.
  • Naval PvP in the open sea.

  Better things in more abundance can be found in the open-sea zone. And as a result, that is why there's an added level of risk associated with opting into those locations. – Steven Sharif

  • Death penalties (mostly) do not apply to objective-based events (also called sanctioned events).
    • Gear degradation applies on death during Caravan PvP.
    • Materials (and resources) will still drop on death during sanctioned PvP events.

During sanctioned PVP events we turn off typical death penalties. You're not going to get res penalties. You're not going to get XP debt. You're not going to get durability damage. You will still drop the things you have in your inventory though: in your material inventory, specifically. – Chris Justo

• There are also reasons to engage in open world PvP, which is subject to the player flagging and corruption system.
  • Contesting open-world dungeons or raids.
  • Contesting scarce resources and hunting grounds.
• The risk of gaining corruption is expected to deter the vast majority of players from griefing other players but this doesn't mean that PvP won't occur in the open-world.

Just because our flagging system gives corruption to PKers, doesn't mean PvP won't happen. There is plenty of reason for PvP to occur open-world. – Steven Sharif

• Lawless zones are open-world areas where the corruption system is disabled in Alpha-2 phase 1 and Alpha-2 phase 2. These are intended to be an Alpha-2-only feature to help test what will become open-sea content.

• There are no plans currently to introduce policies or mechanics for players to designate specific areas as corruption-free or "high stakes" zones.

Q: Have you considered a high-stakes loot drop PvP zone/area in Verra?

A: We have not; and the reason for that is our current PvP systems already allow for material risk essentially that's either through the flagging system or through other event-based pvp opt-in systems as well. – Steven Sharif

• Archetypes such as Tank and Bard are viable in PvP due to the rock-paper-scissors design philosophy, where each class is naturally strong against certain skill compositions.

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Gear

There may be some gear binding (BoE or BoP) but it will be an exception rather than the rule, as this doesn't facilitate the objectives for the economy.

• Very little gear will be account bound or soulbound in Ashes of Creation.
  • The game economy is based around crafting and degradation of items.
• Gear is obtained via crafting, gathering and processing along with raid and dungeon bosses.

A lot of what we experienced in games that usually come before us is that many things are account bound and they're soulbound to your character... Instead very little here is character bound. Very very little. The vast majority of gear- yes you will get quest related gear as rewards- but it won't be let's say one set in one dungeon and you must run the dungeon over and over. Instead we want to really emphasize the reliance on the economy and crafters and gatherers and processors to support a majority of the gear structure in-game, combined with that of world raid bosses and dungeon bosses; not a repetitive quest line through a single dungeon. – Steven Sharif

• Weapons and armor are not class locked, but certain classes are more efficient with certain types of weapons or armor.

Weapons and armor are not race locked, but armor will take on a racial appearance.

Weapon types

Spear and Shield 3D renders. 3D model by Chris Atkins.

Different weapon types offer different passive skills and proc effects from their weapon skill trees as well as different waterfall stats.

• Axes (One and two handed).
• Bows (Longbows and shortbows).
• Clubs.
• Daggers.
• Hammers.
• Lances.
• Maces (One and two handed).
• Orbs.
• Polearms/Halberds.
• Scepters.
• Spears (One and two handed).
• Spellbooks.
• Staves.
• Swords (One and two handed).
• Wands.

Offhand items, such as shields, do not have weapon skill trees.

The following weapon types are not equippable by players.

• Crossbows will not be in the MMO.
  • Previously crossbows were present in Ashes of Creation Apocalypse.
• Potion launchers will only be able to be used as ship attachments in the MMO.
  • Previously potion launchers were present in Ashes of Creation Apocalypse.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

There is an even split between melee and ranged weapons.

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Armor types

Dünir tier 5 plate armor 3D render. This render does not include any special effects as a result of enchanting.

Armor types in Ashes of Creation.

• Helmets.
• Shoulders.
• Cloaks/Capes.
• Chest armor.
• Wrists.
• Gloves.
• Belts.
• Pants.
• Boots.

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Gear appearance

Alpha-1 female plate armor 3D render.

We want to be realistic with the application of particular types of armor, such as plate armor. In this regard for the different sexes there's a fine line that has to be drawn between accentuating the form of the sex as well as making it somewhat realistic and actually applicable to the environment. – Steven Sharif

• Gear is intended to be realistic in appearance.

• There will not be "oversized" weapons.

• Armor will not be overly sexual in appearance.

  I'm more of the mind that it wouldn't really serve a purpose to have bikini plate armor, just in like reality, if you're going to have armor, it should be protective. I think from a fashion statement is enjoyable for some people, but it's a an immersive issue. – Steven Sharif

  • Some armor and costumes will be more revealing than others, but there will not be nudity in the game.

  There might be sliders, but there are not gonna be naked sliders. – Steven Sharif

• Armor will take on a racial appearance. Weapons will scale in size based on race.

Each race is getting its custom geo pieces, which then will share thematic components such as color palette, attachments, design filigree. Those types of things will get shared across the geo but generally you're going to see unique races with unique geo. – Steven Sharif

• The appearance of crafted gear is influenced by its rarity.
  • Particle effects are used to denote the importance and rarity of some weapons.

• Crafters are able to influence what their crafted items look like.

• Cosmetics can be used by all races but there may be slight variations to make them work with the body builds of each race.

• Dye cosmetics can be used to change gear colors.

• Helmet display can be toggled on and off.

• Hair will likely be masked if helmet display is toggled on.

• Weapons are able to be sheathed.

Appearance slots/Transmogs

Alpha-2 plate armor set 3D renders. 3D model by Jan-Allen Cauton.

Gear will have appearance slots (Transmutation/Transmog/cosmetic slots) that are used to copy the appearance of an item (in some cases).

• There are rules when applying cosmetics to specific items, unlike costumes, which don't have level restrictions.
• Cosmetic slots can be toggled on or off on their character by the player.
• A "default player appearance" may be automatically applied during sieges or other large scale battles to improve client-side performance.

Cosmetics, whether purchased from the shop or earned in game, are an important component of MMORPGS I personally enjoy; and there's a lot of collectors out there who spend a great deal of time either in-game achieving these things or spend money purchasing them from the cosmetic only marketplace; and we don't want to demean or reduce that achievement or that expenditure. So it's going to be situational where the default appearance will be applied and can be activated. – Steven Sharif

Gear attachments

Attachments are able to be unlocked as flair pieces to armor to create a customizable look.

• There will be hundreds of attachments available ranging from a small clasp to the front plate of a breast plate.

Races

Five of the nine playable races in Ashes of Creation. From left to right: Dünir female, Dünir male, Niküa male, Vek male, Ren'Kai male, Kaelar male.

The world of Verra was not built on the back of one, but instead of many!

Ashes of Creation offers nine playable races.

Parent race	Races
Aelan Humans	Kaelar.	Vaelune.
Dünzenkell Dwarves	Dünir.	Niküa.
Kaivek Orcs	Ren'Kai.	Vek.
Pyrian Elves	Empyrean.	Py'rai.
	Tulnar.

Verra is a world with rich and diverse cultures. Much of its important history has been dominated by the major races. Humans of the coast and plains, Orcs within the hills and the marshes, Elves in the forest and the riverlands, and the esteemed Dwarves of the mountains. The major races have held dominance through countless wars and skirmishes between the lesser races of Verra. Decades may pass between these flareups of violence. There are many minor races on Verra. Some of the minor races exist in makeshift villages or tribes if you will. Some of the major villages among the minor races are comprised primarily of the Giants, less reputable sects of Human, Gnomes, and Halflings. The Halflings are not Halflings in a traditional sense but actually half-bloods of different races. – Steven Sharif

Wandering the darker places in the world lie truly sinister abominations of creation. The great churches of civilization often dispatch heroes of the state to eliminate these threats to mortals. There currently exist four great nations on Verra. This is 25 years roughly before the fall: The Aelan Empire, Pyrian Kingdom, the Kaivek Protectorate, and the nation of the Dünzenkell. There was not always only four great nations. Long ago the races were more divided into many nations and city states. – Steven Sharif

In the 7,000 years of recorded history, wars upon wars were fought. Some for land, others for resources, many for beliefs. Royal houses stood and fell over the years. Some now long bereft of lordship. Many city states exist in Verra. Some self-governed bastions of democracy and republics alike. Others are vassal states at the behest of their benefactors. – Steven Sharif

Once selected, a character's race should be final.

Your primary archetype selection and your race selection should be - because they have gameplay influences - should be final. – Steven Sharif

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Factions

There are no predefined factions in Ashes of Creation.

It's important to note that Ashes of Creation is a non-faction-based game. What that means is you're not told who your enemy and your friend is. You are not restricted with the players that you can participate in content with. Instead that choice is left to you, the players, and that is an element of the sandbox environment that we're trying to create with Ashes of Creation. – Steven Sharif

Because we are non-faction-based, you want to grant the user the ability to either do things that are "evil" or "good", so there has to be a plethora of choice on the evil side for them to participate in. – Steven Sharif

• There are pseudo-factions (temporary factions) in Ashes of Creation.
  • Node wars flag the citizens of the warring nodes and their allies as enemies for the duration of the node war.
  • Guild wars flag the members of the warring guilds and their allies as enemies for the duration of the guild war.
  • Social organizations offer quest lines to assault other organizations.

We present the player with these soft friction events and then that determines who your friends and your foes are. – Steven Sharif

Classes

With 8 Archetypes to combine, players may choose from 64 total combinations to create their class.

Secondary
		Bard	Cleric	Fighter	Mage	Ranger	Rogue	Summoner	Tank
Primary	Bard	Minstrel	Soul Weaver	Tellsword	Magician	Song Warden	Trickster	Songcaller	Siren
	Cleric	Scryer	High Priest	Templar	Oracle	Protector	Shadow Disciple	Shaman	Apostle
	Fighter	Bladedancer	Highsword	Weapon Master	Spellsword	Hunter	Shadowblade	Bladecaller	Dreadnought
	Mage	Sorcerer	Acolyte	Battle Mage	Archwizard	Spellhunter	Shadow Caster	Warlock	Spellstone
	Ranger	Bowsinger	Soulbow	Strider	Scion	Hawkeye	Scout	Falconer	Sentinel
	Rogue	Charlatan	Cultist	Duelist	Nightspell	Predator	Assassin	Shadow Lord	Shadow Guardian
	Summoner	Enchanter	Necromancer	Wild Blade	Spellmancer	Beastmaster	Shadowmancer	Conjurer	Brood Warden
	Tank	Argent	Paladin	Knight	Spellshield	Warden	Nightshield	Keeper	Guardian

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Roles

Ashes of Creation has the traditional trinity of Tank, DPS (damage dealers) and Support (healer or non-healer) roles.

We have our eight base archetypes; and the trinity is a pretty strong influence with regards to the eight base classes. However the area in which we actually begin to play with that line between the trinity is in the secondary classes that you can pick. That's where we begin to blend those spaces and allow people a little bit of influence over their role and whether or not they fit perfectly within a particular category within the trinity. – Steven Sharif

• Although traditional roles are present, players should not feel branded by their primary archetype.
• Skill augments available through the class system allow characters to be personalized outside of their primary role.
• Players can also double down on their archetype choice to strengthen their primary role.

Religions

Religious temple in a Metropolis node.

We're talking about a pantheon here, not necessarily separate religions. They're all offshoots of who is the better god, or who is the god who identifies best with you. – Jeffrey Bard

There are six primary religions as well as a Tulnar/Underrealm religion.

• Religion is intended to be a motivator, not an aesthetic.
• Choosing a religion enables players to walk a light or a dark path through their choice of questlines and other actions.
  • Players will not be able to worship The Others at temples, but certain quest paths will allow darker forms of worship.

There will be questlines. There will be certain actions that players are capable of taking to perhaps pursue the darker side of this metaverse so to speak. – Steven Sharif

Sometimes games in the past have tried to shy away from heavy emphasis on religion because of the parallels that can occur between what is in the real world and this fantasy realm. I don't really subscribe to that theory. I think that religion plays a very significant role in the story of what Ashes of Creation is about and it is very much this almost monolithic idea of good vs. evil; so that is really at the crux of what the overarching narrative will be in the game; and I'm not trying to pigeonhole players into "everyone has to be good", like I said earlier there will be opportunities for players to deviate from that, should they so choose to roleplay in that regard. – Steven Sharif

• PvP wars between religions are not a planned feature for the game.

The Tulnar religion is a combination of religious beliefs of the major races as well as pagan beliefs of the minor races over time as they coexisted together in the Underrealm.

• The Tulnar are not a result of corruption.

The progression of the Tulnar- while they are still the staples of what were once the primary deities of the good pantheon remained for the Tulnar, over the time they existed and evolved into the society that they are at the return to Verra. It's much more similar... to the way the Creole religions advanced, with using components of Christianity as well as Voodoo and other smaller, more "paganesque" religions; and incorporated them into one. To that degree, you can correlate the way that society around the Tulnar has this almost combination of what were pagan beliefs from the minor races as well as the introductions of the major beliefs and religions from the major races, because they all came together in the Underrealm and survived in that regard. So you’re gonna see naturally a combination of those two things. – Steven Sharif

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Character

Waterfall stats.

Primary attribute	Stat
Constitution.
	Max Health
	Health Regeneration
	Physical Mitigation
	Physical Disable Evasion
Dexterity.
	Physical Critical Chance
	Attack Speed
	Physical Evasion
	Physical Disable Accuracy
Intelligence.
	Magical Power
	Magical Critical Power
	Magical Penetration
	Magical Accuracy
Mentality.
	Max Mana
	Mana Regeneration
	Magical Mitigation
	Magical Disable Evasion
Strength.
	Physical Power
	Physical Critical Power
	Physical Accuracy
	Physical Penetration
Wisdom.
	Magical Critical Chance
	Magical Casting Speed
	Magical Evasion
	Magical Disable Accuracy

Stats in Ashes of Creation are derived from primary attributes (Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Mentality, Strength, and Wisdom) via a waterfall system.

A waterfall stat is a derivative of an attribute. So, if dexterity is your attribute stat and a waterfall from dexterity is critical rate, that would be considered a waterfall stat: the critical rate. – Steven Sharif

• Primary attributes are also referred to as Core stats, Primary stats, and Base stats.

• Base stats are defined by a character's primary archetype.
  • These can be improved based on gear, tattoos, and other enhancements, such as socketed items.

• Concentration will be a stat for spell casters.

• There will be diminishing returns on certain stats, but there won't be hard caps.

This section contains potentially outdated information from Alpha-1 testing.

Primary attributes in Alpha-1:

• Constitution.
• Dexterity.
• Mentality.
• Power.
• Will.
• Wisdom.

Alts

• There will be a "comfortable" number of character slots available for alts.

• Progression pathways in Ashes of Creation are per-character.

• Storage space is shared between characters on the same account.
  • Gear will be able to be transferred between characters on the same account.
  • Transfer of resources and materials is only be possible via player housing storage, which is localized to a particular house.

• Characters on the same account are able to share player housing, including furniture and freehold workstations.

• Cosmetics can be reassigned to characters within an account, with a potential cooldown period.

• Alts within a single account may have different professions.

Character creator

Scars in the Alpha-2 character creator (first pass).

The cool thing about this character creator is that it's not just intended for your character. It has application with NPCs that you might hire. – Steven Sharif

We're gonna use similar tech for implementing things like Animal husbandry. – Zachary Mallet

Kaelar Alpha-2 character creation (first pass).

This tech is 100% created in-house at Intrepid and is not metahuman. – Steven Sharif

We'll be adding many, many more customization options to the character creator. – Cody Peterson

The character creator (or character customization system) allows players to define the look of their in-game characters, hired NPCs; and potentially creatures raised by the animal husbandry profession.

• Character appearance can be adjusted through a wide range of presets and sliders.
• Character blending provides easy to use customization by morphing together two or more character presets.
• Character sculpting allows detailed customization of every aspect of the body.

The Ashes of Creation character creator is 100% developed in-house by Intrepid Studios and is not MetaHuman.

Additional character creator features include.

• There will be unlockable features for character customization.

You have that scar because you participated in this siege, or these many sieges; or you have this tattoo because of your of a cultural background, or because of a quest that was accomplished where you're able to get that. – Steven Sharif

• The ability to save and potentially to share characters with other players.

The beauty of it is that you can save your character- and we already have some of those features available- and load them; and in the future we want people to be able to share those characters amongst each other. – Margaret Krohn

• The ability to undo changes (Ctrl + Z) will be supported, including undoing changes that were made several edits earlier.
• Choosing base idle animations of characters will be possible in future.
  • Certain animations, such as blinking, will be present when they don't interfere with the customization process.
• Certain ability sound effects will adhere to character customization selections, such as race.
• Adjusting the background scene and lighting is a planned feature.

There's going to be a lot of environmental controls that are offered to the character creator so that people can set it up their scene the way they want to grab screenshots or to grab recordings or whatever they want to do. – Steven Sharif

• Asymmetry in terms of manipulating different components of the body or different body features such as hair, beard, and eyes.

Asymmetry is going to be functionality that's possible in manipulating either different components of the body or different features like hair. The beard we saw a little bit of that blending with highlights that you can do. Margaret talked a little bit about the eye asymmetry that you can include. Obviously those are going to exist within certain parameters that we want to define on a per-race basis, but it is something that we think is cool. – Steven Sharif

• Body adornments, such as piercings will be possible within cultural limits.
• The developers are considering whether to allow custom tattoos to be uploaded by users.
• A future development, post-Alpha-2 launch, may enable users to upload an image to use as a basis for a character's appearance.

The aim is for the character creator to be on par if not much better than that of BDO.

Character appearance

Facial adjustments in the Alpha-2 character creator (first pass).

There is a great variation that's going to be available from a character standpoint when creating your character, especially around the face. Whether it be the shape of the jawline, the cheeks, the ears, the nose, the lips. You know we want to provide a lot of options and an agency to the player to customize their character appearance. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-2 Py'rai female and male character models.

Character appearance can be customized in the character creator (CC) and via in-game salons/barbershops.

We want there to be a lot of room for people to manifest their own identity, to role play how they want to from an appearance standpoint. There's going to be parameters within which you will be able to customize a character. We want the culture and the identity of the races to exist in a range that makes them easily identifiable from other players and other cultures. So, because of that, we have to have a spectrum you can exist on. There will be a lot of hair variants you can do, body art tattoos that you can apply. You'll be able to play with the scales of the facial structure, the bones, the height, width, the body fat percentage. You'll be able to add body hair on different parts of the body. If you want to have hair on your feet, you can dial that up. – Steven Sharif

• Character models are focused on realism.
• A player will see a generic character before customization.
• Character designs will have influences from a wide range of cultures, such as European, African and Asian.
• Lolis will not be in the game.
• Sliders and other controls, such as color palettes, will offer flexibility in customization but there will be limits based on race, gender, and the artistic style guidelines that the developers are adhering to.

There's going to be constraints to the sliders, so that was one of those big questions as work began on the character creator: How much agency do you want to allow pulling like the lower lip all the way down in this weird deformed look, or having like [an] offset cheek that's just asymmetrical to the side of the face. There's not going to be the ability or agency to create those types of weird character things. However you will have the ability to move, slide, change, grow, decrease all those components, but they'll be kept in a more reasonable and presented way in the same sense you won't be able to change the appearance of the dwarven, nor the Dünir or the Niküan races to, in my opinion, create what would be traditionally considered a Loli character. – Steven Sharif

Body appearance

Vaelune, Dünir and Empyrean Alpha-1 early character model 3D renders.

So many options coming down the road. Our character team continues to refine our customization options! – Steven Sharif

• Body presets.
  • Body tone: Overweight, skinny, muscular.
  • Body fat percentage.
  • Bone structure.

• Body type.
  • Height.
  • Weight.
  • Chest (boobie slider).
    • The scale is not going to be ridiculous.
  • Crotch (bulge) slider.
  • Bottom (booty) slider.

• Skin.
  • Wrinkles (age).
  • Base skin color.
    • Hue.
    • Pigmentation.

Head appearance

Alpha-2 character creator hair and beard customization (first pass).

Every hair color uses the accent and the fill differently, but usually the fill is the root color and the accent is the tip color. – Zachary Mallet

Alpha-2 Vek hairstyles.

• Full face presets.
• Hair.
  • Hair preset.
    • Length.
    • Contrast.
    • Gradient.
  • Fill color.
  • Accent color.
  • All (color).

• Beard.
  • Chin.
    • Chin length.
  • Cheek.
    • Cheek length.
  • Lip.
    • Lip length.
    • Contrast.
    • Gradient.
  • Fill color.
  • Accent color.
  • All (color).
  • Female Dwarven beards will not match that of the male. It will be more of a braided option that is not as voluminous.

Face appearance

Vek presets in the Alpha-2 character creator (first pass).

Heads will be relatively proportional to the body size, with some limited variability.

• Eyes.
  • Iris.
  • Eye color.

• Facial features.
  • Forehead presets.
  • Brow presets.
  • Eyes presets.
  • Ears presets.
  • Cheeks presets.
  • Mouth presets.

Appearance details

• Nails.
  • Nail color.
    • Strength.

• Tattoos, scars, and body art.
  • Decals.
    • Angle.
    • Strength.
    • Size.
    • Discoloration.
  • Color.

A "default player appearance" may be automatically applied during sieges or other large scale battles to improve client-side performance.

Read more...

Cosmetics

Rime and Regal‎ pre-order pack cosmetics.

We are very transparent in the business model of subscription with cosmetic only marketplace... I respect and understand the opinion of rather having a box price in-place of cosmetics, but that is not the direction I’ve decided to take. After weighing the benefits to the game and its population, I believe a lower barrier to entry is healthier in the long run, and the steady content release and quality of the product will sustain the retention for subscription and in-turn provide a healthier content release strategy for Ashes. – Steven Sharif

Cosmetics provide a wide array of customization in Ashes of Creation.

• There are no pay-to-win gameplay benefits from any purchasable items.

All skin cosmetic items are cosmetic items only and do not grant the user any other benefit. The lore text is flavor text, and background of the creatures and items in the world of Verra.

• Types of cosmetics:
  • Skins
  • Costumes
  • Racial skins
  • Dyes

• Equitable cosmetics, both from a quantity and quality standpoint, are achievable through in-game means. Cosmetics achievable in-game will be on-par, and in the case of legendary skins, even more elaborate than shop items.

I want to make sure that equitable cosmetics both from a quantity and quality standpoint are achievable through in-game achievements. Time, effort should let you be happy with what you can accomplish. – Steven Sharif

In my opinion quality of cash shop cosmetics should be equal to in game achievable cosmetics, but offer a diverse selection of unique looks. – Steven Sharif

• There will be legendary cosmetics that are only achievable in-game that will never be offered in the cosmetic shop.

The most grand looking cosmetics will be from in-game achievment only. – Steven Sharif

• There will not be recolors or material swaps on the monthly cosmetics as a means to populate in-game achievements.
  • There will be variants of the monthly cosmetics for NPCs and Mobs.
  • Component pieces of cosmetic armor may be reused in other in-game achievable gear sets.

From an armor standpoint, we cut armor sets up into many different pieces. These pieces can sometimes be used as part of other sets, that may include helmets, wrists, gloves etc. So while you will not see an achievable white version of the corvid castigator set in the game for example, you may see its shoulder piece used in another set, or its leggings, or wrist piece used in another set (not every piece as to form the whole set, but perhaps a couple pieces). This would be difficult to notice at first glance, due to the material, texture and color variation used, but this modular approach to content creation makes achieving a wide variety of looks achievable for an MMORPG of our size. – Steven Sharif

• Different variants of store purchased cosmetic creatures (Pets and Mounts) may exist in the wild.

While the exact same skin will not be available again in the future once it's gone from the Shop, these skins are all variants of creatures that you can expect to see across Verra - so perhaps you will find one with a similar style in-game! – Sarah Flanagan

• Cosmetics can be used by all races but there may be slight variations to make them work with the body builds of each race.

• There will not be mascot looking/furry cosmetics.

It's important to remember, Ashes is a NO-BOX COST subscription only game, with an optional cosmetic marketplace. This achieves a few things from a monetization model. Having a lower barrier to entry for players to try the game when they don't have to fork out $60 for the box price is good, our box price is 0$. This also places an emphasis on the game's retention and our continual updates and content creation to keep players playing and staying subscribed (a put your money where your mouth is sort of philosophy for us as a company). It also means players don't have to spend $60 every time there is an expansion. – Steven Sharif

Is there an answer that satisfies everyone? Nope. And that's ok. We are open and transparent with our philosophies and business model. You know what you are getting with Ashes and to me, given my experiences in other games, it is a nice breath of fresh air. – Steven Sharif

• Costume and pet cosmetics don't have a level restriction. Building, ship, caravan and mount cosmetics require an in-game item to be obtained first to apply the cosmetic.

I know there have been quite a few questions regarding cosmetics over the years. As we get further along in development, we'll be providing more specific information regarding what specific buildings, items, etc., you can place each cosmetic on. We'll update this for all past items. – Margaret Krohn

• Cosmetics are not tradeable with other players but can be reassigned to other characters (alts) within the same account.

Obtaining cosmetics

Some cosmetics can be obtained in-game:

• Dyes.
• Costumes.
• Seasonal cosmetics.

Achievements may unlock some cosmetics.

Not all cosmetics are obtainable through in-game means. These will be purchasable through the cosmetic store.

Cash shop cosmetics will be limited in quantity, limited in time for purchase. They will be unique, but you will also have extremely difficult to gain cosmetics in game as well as unique cosmetics that look great and better... There will be a lot of cosmetics that are achievable in the game because that is a very fun aspect of MMO play. – Steven Sharif

Read more...

Lore

Ashes of Creation logo.

Ashes of Creation is a direct reference to the storyline. Without giving too much away, the phoenix is going to be a persistent symbol throughout the first phase of the storyline, and the world that the players will be inhabiting is a long-lost world that has suffered devastating calamity. – Jeffrey Bard

The Phoenix is the celestial avatar of the Goddess of creation. Her sacrifice protected the people of Verra during the apocalypse. – Steven Sharif

There are different parts to the Lore in Ashes of Creation.

• Origin story.
• The story of the fall.
• The story of deliverance/return.

It is about mythology and discovering what truths mythologies are talking about and finding out what really happened on this world so long ago; and that's part of that discovery process; and we want people to feel that throughout the game, not just in terms of lore but in terms of the world itself. – Jeffrey Bard

Story arcs drive one or more storyline quests within the game. Story arcs branch into different stories with multiple possible endings depending on the quest objectives that players complete during each chapter.

• It is possible for some storylines to relate to a darker/evil path, if a character should choose.

We're keeping lore very close to the chest and the reason for that is because it is very rich. It is diverse. It will have applications outside of just the MMORPG. We intend to take it much further, but I want it to be something that the players get to reveal themselves, that's not just handed to them and then the experience is lost. They should feel when they're experiencing this that it relates to them on a personal level. – Steven Sharif

Story arcs

Alpha-2 early preview of the story arc UI.

Story arcs are like a pre-packaged tabletop campaign. They contain all of the NPCs and quests and monsters- all the things you need to make a cool fantasy story. They're not procedurally generated... We write all the dialogue and we construct all the narrative beats and everything like that, but they will enter the world dynamically depending on the state that the world is currently in; how players have built up specific nodes, what races control various nodes. We have plans to include lots of different things on top of that, but we don't have any quest hubs or anything like that in this game, because players build up all the cities. So we had to get a system that looks at what players are doing and can inject content into the world that makes sense for what they're doing. – Skott B

The Blood Still Due story arc unlocking at The Tower of Carphin.

When story arcs come online, they change a lot the environment. They update what monsters are in the world. They create quest NPCs... and then new Pathways can open up through the environment. – Skott B

Story arcs are unlocked by multiple types of player activity within each server realm.

• Cultural activity.

• Regional activity.

• Node progression.

Every stage a node develops it's unlocking narratives, storylines, it's changing the spawn population of the area around it, changing what bosses exist, it's triggering events where you may have legendary dragons attack the city. It's basically writing the story of the server based on the actions and determination of the players. So, you may experience a dungeon one month earlier and have a completely different story that relates to this location the next month, because something has changed either geopolitically or from the node standpoint. – Steven Sharif

• Personal or class-based activity.
  • It is possible for some storylines to relate to a darker/evil path, if a character should choose.

Even player driven mechanics will still have story components. There will be a reason why the player driven mechanic is available or required of the player; so every system that's created touches a story. – Steven Sharif

• If there are too many other major arcs happening at the same time in the same zone, a story arc may need to wait its turn, even if conditions are right for it to be unlocked.

• Story arcs drive one or more storyline quests within the game.
  • Story arcs can branch into different stories with multiple possible endings depending on the quest objectives that players complete during each chapter.
  • The developers will try to ensure that story arcs in future expansions flow on from existing story arcs, regardless of the different possible outcomes.

• Story arcs can initiate world events.

• There will be a variety of different types of story arc content at different scales, with different cooldowns to suit different types of players in the game.

We must provide enough of this content at varying scales such that it isn't worthwhile or economical to control every single story arc in the world. Some will be smaller in scale and production value, and thus, will move faster and have shorter cooldowns before they're reintroduced. – Skott B

• Story arcs offer content tailored to players at various adventuring levels. Lower level story arc content can influence what higher level players are able to do.

Q: Are the story arcs designed to engage players of all levels simultaneously, or certain segments specifically tailored for high-end or endgame content?

A: We have story arcs that do both. We have story arcs that are catered towards high-end level ranges that are very specific to the types of adventuring levels that we want players to participate in that story arc, and then we have some story arcs that have different sections which cater to a broader diversity of level ranges; and the way we approach players participating in those more broader story arcs is that the activities of the lower level players feed up through the story arc, so what they're doing influences even what higher level players are able to do. And meeting the certain quota of objectives that are necessary to progress the story arc requires participation down the line across the story arc features. So, to answer your question shortly: We have both. – Steven Sharif

• Corrupted resources are variations of resources that are only available in corrupted areas or during certain story arcs.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Certain story arcs can be unlocked through the bulletin board system. Certain requirements would need to be met in order to access story arc quests.

• Mayors require certain resources.
• Buildings are required within a node.
• Social organization tasks need to be completed.

Read more...

Progression

Progression occurs through a variety of pathways.

• The objective is to provide both vertical and horizontal progression.

Having the ability to gain power at a sacrifice... That's a way to reach a horizontal type of progression. It may not be entirely, because there could potentially be a meta if balancing isn't done correctly; but the objective there is to make sure we have both vertical and horizontal progression in the game. – Steven Sharif

• Different progression pathways are designed to suit different playstyles.

Multiple playstyles should be relevant and viable. Additionally, you have a spread between casual players and hard-core players; and most of us exist somewhere on that spectrum. The progression path in a society or religion is more conducive to the time we have to play. Whereas, someone else may be playing several hours a day, and they have a better opportunity for the raid/level progression that might require some more dedication. So we want to have these different progression paths available to accommodate the different times in our lives that we have to play the game. And all of those types of progressions will make us relevant in some way shape or form to the general world. – Steven Sharif

• Progression pathways in Ashes of Creation are per-character.

The way that Ashes is constructed is there are multiple paths of progression from a from a PvX perspective, a wide net perspective that players have interest in; and you're not going to be able to become the master of everything. So you're going to have to pick and choose, but even picking and choosing that gives you a place within that aspect of the world at a place that's going to be something that you can build up a reputation around. – Steven Sharif

• The ratio that various progression systems influence player power will evolve over time. In the early game adventuring level may be the dominant influence on player power. Gear may become more influential on player power closer toward endgame.

Q: Could you explain in detail what you mean by 50% of player power when talking about gear influence on player power?

A: That's just a general allocation of what players can expect to pursue when enhancing their player character power. Now obviously, the distribution and ratio of those types of influences, whether it be itemization, whether it be level, whether it be, augments choices, and/or skill tree choices: those influences and ratios change through the leveling curve. So, at lower levels your character level is going to be more influential over character power than itemization will be, but at endgame or higher levels, or at the end of the adventuring level progression, that's when itemization really gets an emphasis for its ratio of player power. – Steven Sharif

• Repetition will not be part of progression in Ashes of Creation.

The game hosts a wide array of progression paths, and some of those paths will grant additional paths to augmenting your threat generation. This can be in the form of enchantments and stats ... and even in the form of augments granted from societies and religions. Gear and skills choice are also a big component. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-1 early iteration of the level-up effect by Jim Sanders.

One of the cool abilities we all love seeing and gives us a major dopamine response is when our character levels up. – Steven Sharif

Leveling won't follow a traditional linear path, although classic mechanics for leveling exist.

Leveling: the act of of going out and adventuring, of killing monsters, and combat in general is the most tactile and moment-to-moment type of gameplay that you're going to experience in Ashes of Creation; and I think at every step of the way in that adventure it should be fun, and it should be something that you enjoy doing, and it should be something that's rewarding, and it should be something that teaches you more about the immersive world that you're in and allows you to follow a compelling storyline. – Steven Sharif

• Players will have the option to rush their vertical progression to level cap or spend time building infrastructure through horizontal progression.

• Experience (XP) is gained through a variety of vertical and horizontal progression paths, such as PvP, PvE, Exploration, Gathering/Processing/Crafting, Events/Quests, Grinding mobs.
  • XP will be awarded for participating in objective-based PvP on a diminishing returns basis.

• A character's level is visible to other players.

• Some levels may offer more rewards than others.

I think you can emphasize some levels more than others and that's a great way to do progression. But I think ultimately that you should see a reward for your progress or effort spent. – Steven Sharif

• There will not be level boosts or auto-leveling (AFK leveling).

As part of our ideals as a game we're not going to give boosts away. We're not going to auto-level up a character. You have to spend time acclimating yourself to what this game is, to what the world that you're part of is; and that's an investment- a time investment; and that plays towards our ideas of risk-versus-reward; and I've always said our game's not going to be for everybody and that's okay. – Steven Sharif

• There won't be any damage dampening due to differences in levels in either PvP or PvE.

If I have a skill that does a thousand damage to a target of equal level I don't want my skill to do zero damage to a target that's five levels above me. – Steven Sharif

• A player could in theory level to max level at a single node, providing that node was at a high-enough stage, but it would not be the most effective means of leveling.

Read more...

End game

Ashes of Creation will not have a typical end-game where content is essentially static and repetitive. Instead, max-level characters will be able to engage with many different gameplay loops that open up based on how the world progresses over time.

Endgame to me communicates static. It is static structure. Okay, you've entered this loop, now and this is your end-game loop that you will repeat over and over. Whereas instead, the approach for Ashes is you have now reached a point where all of these loops are relevant; and the loops are present to you depending on how the community engages the world. And it's up to you to identify the most promising loops because you have a finite amount of time and resources in which you can engage with them. And that's then where strategy becomes a part of the picture: How will I choose to engage with these loops to maximize my return, or to maximize the specific benefit I wish to bring in individual, group, myself, or guild. – Steven Sharif

Part of the whole experience with nodes is that there is no real end-game, in that the world is constantly shifting every day. Month one is going to be really different from month two; and that's for the level 50s and level 1s. – Jeffrey Bard

Level cap

The level cap at launch is expected to be level 50.

• On release the developers anticipate max level should be attainable in approximately 45 days if playing 4-6 hours per day.
• The developers estimate that players will reach level cap before a quarter of nodes reach Village (stage 3).
• Alpha-2 phase-1 is expected to have a max level of 25 for both adventuring and artisanship professions. This is expected to increase during Alpha-2 phase 3. Previously this was stated to be level 30.. Level 35 was expected prior to that.
• Alpha-1 had progression to level 15.
• The developers expect that lower level characters will have usefulness in mass combat (such as Node sieges) that is not directly dependent on their character level, such as manning siege weapons, helping repair fortifications, bringing proximity-based buffs to key positions, using stealth or scaling walls.

The idea is not to be a game where somebody can essentially no life for a week and be max level. The idea is to incorporate some significant chunk of time but still respect the casual player, because the way we respect the casual player is not everything is driven in our game through the adventuring progression line. Not everything is driven through your class level per-se. There's a lot of different progression paths that are available and make you relevant within certain systems and mechanics within the game; and some of those paths are more casual friendly and some of those paths are more hardcore friendly. So with regards to the adventuring class, the idea is to make sure that investment needs to be pretty significant and that the reward then is respective of that investment. – Steven Sharif

Grinding

Repetition will not be part of progression in Ashes of Creation.

• There will be no "grindy" quests.
• There will not be repetitive quest lines through a single dungeon to obtain gear.
• The aspiration is to have more things to do in the game than a player has time to do.

There's a lot of different systems that I think leverage the art of deduction and gathering more information, rather than just smashing your face into the keyboard repeatedly. – Steven Sharif

AFK leveling

There will not be AFK leveling (auto-leveling) in Ashes of Creation.

We want this game to be played. If there are things that you can do to not play the game and still progress, we've done something wrong. – Jeffrey Bard

Level scaling

Levels or stats of bosses will not scale due to player levels or numbers, however boss AI is able to adapt to player numbers through the selection of mechanics and behaviors.

Q: Will world bosses scale when it comes to player levels and is it based on players or the zone itself leveling?

A: They will not scale based on player level, no. – Steven Sharif

Class progression

Class progression in Ashes of Creation proceeds as follows:

• A player chooses their primary archetype at the start of the game.
  • A player cannot change their primary archetype.

• Players receive skill points as they level. These can be used to level up skills within their skill tree.
  • It will not be possible to max all skills in a skill tree.

• A player may choose a secondary archetype when they reach level 25. The combination of primary and secondary archetypes is referred to as a class.
  • The secondary archetype does not provide additional skills.
  • Secondary archetypes may be changed, but not "on-the-fly".
  • The player can then augment their primary skills with effects from their secondary archetype.

When thinking about how augments work, they represent the core function of the archetype that you're then getting augment schools for. – Steven Sharif

• Class progression does not relate to a player's artisan progression.

• World events do not directly impact class effectiveness but there may be ancillary effects in terms of availability of equipment, enchantments or tattoos.

Weapon progression

In-game achievable sword and polearm 3D renders.

Power creep is a balance issue... When it comes to gear progression specifically, the idea is to create an open market that is not heavily dependent on soulbound items; and having many item sinks and gold sinks within that economy that allows for the potential degradation and loss of assets within that closed economy; and not introduce items from the market that companies put in from a pay-to-win perspective or from a pay-to-convenience perspective that undermines the economy that players have built. That is a huge mistake that companies have made in the past and that lends to the imbalancing of what designers maybe have actually balanced well. – Steven Sharif

Weapons have their own progression paths.

• Each type of weapon has its own skill tree that grants passive skills and proc effects and other status conditions.
• The weapon combo system determines special effects that proc based on weapon progression.
• Ancillary effects proc based on enchantment types.
• Gear enhancements (power stones) can be applied to add elemental or energy types of damage.
• Dual wielded weapons will have its own progression based on weapon type.
• Weapon proficiency (based on length of use of a weapon) is not a planned feature.

Ashes of Creation is all about providing many progression paths... The reason why we don't like the term endgame is because with the amount of progression that's available with the amount of diversity and player agency that impacts the world... We want the weapon system [to] add an element of that as well... You can determine special effects that proc from currently the combo system; you can determine ancillary effects that proc based on enchantment types; you can power stone weapons to add different either elemental types of damage and/or energy that play rock-paper-scissor with player defenses ... and then you can skill tree out how those effects that are granted ... you can make them better you can branch them off into a different direction. – Steven Sharif

Pet progression

Combat pets will be levelable and will have gear available to them.

• Combat pets will incorporate some of their owner's power in a way that keeps the power progression horizontal.
  • Power is delegated to the pet when it is summoned and returned to the player immediately when the pet despawns.

Summoner summons (Summoner pets) do add to the summoner's power when they are summoned.

• Gear is not available to Summoner summons.

Combat pets, which can be acquired by any archetype- and this is essentially an item that exists within your backpack- you cast the item to summon your pet. When it is summoned it's not intended to be a vertical gain of power, because when you make combat pets a vertical power gain, then it becomes a no choice solution: you must have a combat pet if you want to play efficiently- you must have a combat pet; and I wanted to steer clear of that because the way I wanted to approach combat pets was more of a horizontal power choice; meaning: depending on the type of encounter you're facing, depending on the threat assessment you have, a combat pet might be relevant, or it might not. One combat combat pet might be more relevant than another combat pet and that's part of your gear acquisition, your item chase to attain this more comprehensive selection of combat pets that you can have available to you and can be summoned in the event that you want to engage an encounter with a different aspect of your power curve: Not vertical, but horizontal. – Steven Sharif

Artisan progression

Artisan progression.

Artisan level	Artisan certification	Profession limit per character
1-10.	Novice.	22.
10-20.	Apprentice.	5.
20-30.	Journeyman.	4.
30-40.	Master.	3.
40-50.	Grandmaster.	2.

Leveling up in the Lumberjacking profession in Alpha-2.

Artisan progression occurs based on experience (repetition of tasks) as well as achievements of certain benchmarks within each artisan branch (Gathering, Processing and Crafting). Progression in each artisan profession is per-character.

• Artisans start off as novices in all professions.

All 22 professions, the players get to be novice of; and then it starts narrowing from there. So, after that you'll only be able to be apprentice of five things. You can be a journeyman in four things. You can be a master in three things; and you can be a grandmaster in two things. So you'll need to narrow, but you can also diversify to support the professions that you want to first push further in. – Kory Rice

• Progression to each "tier" within a profession grants skill points that can be utilized in a character's artisan skill tree.
  • Artisan certification quests must be completed to gain proficiency in that tier of artisan progression. Completing certification unlocks benefits for that profession, such as artisan tools for gathering professions and recipes for crafting professions.
  • There are limits to the number of professions at each certification tier across the three artisan branches. For example: a character may only ever be a Master in up to 3 professions and Grandmaster in up to 2 professions across all artisan branches.
  • Grandmaster artisans can max out their entire profession skill tree, but a character can only be a grandmaster of up to two professions.
  • Achieving an artisan certification in a profession also implies that the character also achieved any lower-tier certifications up to that point.

If you are grand master in that profession you can max out the entire tree. But you can only grand master 2 things. – Kory Rice

• Choosing a specific path in the skill tree allows the player an opportunity to specialize in a certain area. This encourages player inter-dependency, enhancing the artisan experience.

• Progression within artisan classes does not directly relate to progression in a character's adventuring class, but there are requirements that take into account dangers, locations, toolsets, and surveying options that are dependent on adventuring level.
  • Characters gain XP as they progress their professions.
  • It should be expected that some artisans will have significantly higher artisan level than their adventuring level.

Q: In regards to character level and artisan level. We know that currently there are two separate things. That being said, what prevents a player from staying level one and partying up with a level 50 player to then gather level 50 resources in the high zones? That way, anyone who wants to take those resources will have to kill the gatherer who is level one and get a large amount of corruption for killing a level one as a level 50.

A: Gathering higher level resources requires significant advancement within a particular profession for that gatherable resource. So, if I'm a Miner and I want to access the highest possible mineral, I need to be a master miner; and in order to achieve the master minor status I am going to be gaining adventuring level experience through that process, because many of those quest lines, many of those achievements are facilitated through quest lines. Some of those quest lines interface with adventuring difficulties that are out in the wild at certain levels. So that's going to predicate me- that's going to be a predicate for me to achieve a certain level in order to complete some of these quest lines and achieve that master status. So you will you will likely not see the ability of a level one alt character having the access to high level mineral mining, or any other type of gatherable out there. – Steven Sharif

Religion progression

There are player progression paths within a religion.

• Players may follow only one religion at a time.
• Religious progression is based on quests that are only offered to followers of that religion.
• Religions have a ranking system based on a player's performance in these quests and the number of quests completed.
• Changing religion will cause loss of progress in a player's previous religion.

It depends on their dedication to the religion itself; their performance when it comes to certain religion's religious objectives; their contribution to the development of that religion within the world. There's a lot of different markers that we use at each stage to determine how they progress within the religion. – Steven Sharif

Naval progression

Mariner classes (also referred to as boatsmanship classes, boatsman skills or seamanship) contain different skill trees arranged in a similar manner to Artisan classes. As a player gains experience in these different skills they become more adept at using them.

• Interaction with attachments, such as gunnery.
• Piloting/driving the ship.
• Ship navigation.
• Utilizing ship components, such as furling the sails.
• Ship repair, such as the speed and amount of health restored.
• Defensive skills.
• Utility based skills.

The benefits of having Mariner expertise is not just related to activities you can do on the ships, but will also incorporate skills that become available when you're piloting ships as well. There's a few things that Mariner classes provide: interaction with attachments on the ship, driving the ship itself, utilizing the ship's components—like furling the sails or not—as well as repairing ships when damage is taken—the speed at which you can do it, the health you regenerate when you do it. – Steven Sharif

Zones and progression

Dungeons, Raids, World bosses, Mobs, Quests, Events, Resources, Narratives and other content within a node's ZOI will have a diverse level range; but will scale with the advancement of that node and its racial influence.

• Portions of the spawn tables (for mobs and resources) are static and other portions are dynamic and adapt to node development.

We don’t have a strictly level 25 zone. Instead, that zone might have some level 10 creatures near the road, some level 20 creatures deep in the forest, and some level 30 creatures up the mountain. These ratios will change based on the Nodes that inform them, becoming generally more dangerous as the Node grows. All this civilization attracts the attention of Things-That-Should-Not-Be. This does not mean that wilderness areas are safe, by any means. Some may be safe-er, but all will have dangers that even the most experienced traveler needs to watch out for. – Steven Sharif

Guild progression

Guild perks UI. Alpha-1 screenshot. Image credit: Guild:Overlord

As you're leveling up the guild and you're getting these points to either allocate towards expanding the guilds member count or allocate towards adding certain passive abilities that your guild members can gain by being guild members. You're also going to see as you're leveling up the guild through different type of quest-based, participation-based, node-based, organization-based systems and ways that those quests hook into the world. You're also going to see perhaps some augment abilities at the upper tiers of the guild levels become unlocked for certain members that have a classification of officer or knight, will have access to those different types of augment abilities that might get unlocked should you go down the non expansive member lane; and the idea there is to offer these benefits to smaller groups. – Steven Sharif

Guild progression occurs through participation in different systems.

• Quests.
• Nodes.
• Social organizations.
• Crafting certain items.
• Events.

Guild progression grants skill points that the guild can allocate to unlock aspects of their guild skill tree, such as passive skills, augments and membership count.

• Guild size can be traded off for guild progression.
  • The higher the guild's member cap, the fewer available skill options will be available to that guild.
  • The maximum size for a guild that chooses all available skill options will be between 30 and 50.

When you first form a guild and you're level zero, you may have 30 guild slots available to you and that's your core guild group; and you can move people in and out of that group because when you get expansion slots they form separate groups in the guild structure that might be a Knight or Squadron group: whatever you're going to want to call it, because you can customize it based on the guild; and then those groups will have access to certain types of passives. Some of the passive types will be horizontal, some will be vertical; and it will be dependent on where you as a guild member are placed within those groups; and the placement within those groups are determined by the guild administrators. And so, guilds will then spend currency as well as skill points to invest in those passives for those particular groups; and so what we want to do is we want to maintain the strongest passives for the central groups and allow it to decrease in power going outward from there. So, even guilds that select to go expansionist still have some passive abilities that they can spec into, but the guilds that choose to stay smaller they can consert their skill points towards the more central groups leveling up those passives to higher strengths; and those passive types are things like waterfall stat augments, crit rate, regen values. And then they can get a little bit more intricate with the types of effects that they have, like negating a... spell attack against you as a target every 30 seconds, or something. It depends on what we're talking about with the abilities. They they are wide ranging, but the intent is for them to be impactful. – Steven Sharif

• Guild passive skills are assigned to specific ranks within the guild, each of which has a number of slots depending on guild progression.
  • These skills can increase certain waterfall stats such as (Regen and Crit rate) relating to that rank's ability to perform in combat or potentially in other aspects of the guild, such as the economy.
  • Guild passives can have also have more intricate effects, such as negating certain attacks within a cooldown period.
  • Guilds cannot respec their skill points once allocated. This is subject to testing.
  • Guild members do not need to be citizens of the same node in order to benefit from passive skills and augments.

It's not always going to be combat. You could have an economic focus guild. You could have a trade oriented guild; and there's all sorts of things that you can put together and give your guild its own identity. – Jeffrey Bard

• Guild halls can be unlocked at a certain stage of guild advancement.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• Guild augments may apply at the upper tiers of guild progression.
  • This applies to guilds that have opted for the non-expansive member route.
  • It benefits guild members with a classification of officer or knight.

Social organization progression

Social organization progression is achieved through accomplishing tasks or quests within that social organization.

• Some progression is static, but more competitive achievements will be seasonal, based on a ladder system.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

There are hierarchical paths pertaining to specific questlines for the organization's thematic. These quests will either be cooperative with or adversarial against other nodes based on their mutual war status.

• Sabotage.
• Espionage.
• Intrigue.

- For example, a Thieves' guild may have objectives and quests toward securing a particular item to enable players to advance within the organization.

Social organizations are going to have questlines that players participate in which some will include sabotage, espionage, intrigue... While it's not necessarily player versus player in the combat sense, it is player versus player in pitting communities in those organizations against each other in a competitive atmosphere, where only some things can be accomplished by certain communities; and not everybody can succeed at a particular task. So, I think that that's a unique way to involve meaningful conflict that doesn't necessarily have to relate to PvP, because obviously we have a lot of PvP systems in the game and and there are many ways for players to participate in player versus player combat; but we also want to make sure that from a progression standpoint, from a system standpoint there are going to be abilities of individuals to follow these questlines, these tasks that will pit organizations against each other, specifically from an organizational standpoint. – Steven Sharif

Alliance progression

Ashes of Creation may have specific content that revolves around Alliances.

• Progression pathways within alliances.
• Guilds sharing common services with alliance members.
• Node alliances.

Content that revolves around alliances specifically and progression within the development of that alliance; and the ability to share some common services between guilds that are part of that alliance. I think that additionally allowing alliances to toggle certain relationships with nodes as an interaction is beneficial. That's going to provide an interesting dynamic for players who are either members of the particular node that has the relationship established or members of the Alliance. So I think that obviously building systems is is about creating the channels by which these players can form bonds and the more layers you have around those channels of bonding between the different guilds or players, the more sustainable that relationship. – Steven Sharif

Freehold progression

Freehold progression unlocks new bonuses, abilities and capabilities for freeholds.

• Freehold buildings are able to be levelled up based on the length of time and productivity of the freehold.

We want there to be progression in many systems and part of the freehold progression is that when you establish these base buildings the longer and more productive you are and exist with that freehold, the more opportunity those buildings will have to both level up: offering new bonuses, new abilities, new capabilities; and just surviving in this world is a feat in and of itself, so it's rewarded by allowing progression with those things. – Steven Sharif

The longer a tavern is in business and the more patrons served, the faster the tavern will level up.

Q: What benefits do players receive for taking on the role of a tavern owner?

A: You will get noticeability with regards to your creations because that will be displayed to the characters that consume those things; but, in addition, you can get certain types of itemization rewards depending on the number of patrons that you serve. You can also reap economic rewards, such as gold from the inn that you are selling your goods at. And then you can unlock access to certain types of recipes and or vendors based on the level of reputation you build up in that particular node. – Steven Sharif

• Taverns have tech trees that allow the tavern owner to specialize and upgrade specific bonuses and services provided by the business.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• There may be quests that can only be gathered from player-owned taverns.

Monster coin progression

Monster coin progression unlocks more advanced monster skills based on how often a character plays each type of monster in the monster coin system.

The intent behind that design is that the more often you play that monster, you will gain access to additional abilities; and this is to ease players into the gameplay of specific types of monsters. So, the intent for the design there is: your first few times playing with the monster you're going to have access to a unique subset of abilities that are that are pretty straightforward; and then as you gain that experience, that's another progression loop that you can pursue, and you will unlock more intricate and complicated abilities for that particular monster. – Steven Sharif

• As nodes advance, so does the scale of the monsters. There are tiers of events denoting the caliber of the monsters being spawned.

In Ashes of Creation a large portion of world events revolve around the environment reacting to the player. This means that as players are exploring the world and developing civilization around them the environment is responding to this encroachment by spawning dynamic events and creatures to attack those developing cities. These events occur in 3 different types: the Legion level the Elite level and the Epic level. – Steven Sharif

• The tier of the monster coin dictates how powerful the monster is.

Q: Will World bosses like the like Tumok take part in the NPC sieges on nodes and will players be able to use a monster coin to play as one of those world bosses in an event?

A: That is the intent, is that we will have varying quality of monster coins available creatures like Tumok may participate in certain atrophy events or other types of events; and if you have the very rare and legendary type of monster coin that's available to be used on a creature type like Tumok then yes, you could inhabit him. That's the intent of the system. – Steven Sharif

First-time user experience

A first-time user experience system is expected to be implemented during the beta testing phases.

The first-time user experience is something that's going to have a lot of love and attention during Betas, but is not going to have much attention during Alpha-2. But it is intended for us to have a very in-depth first-time user experience to introduce players to the number of different systems. They're not going to be super in-depth. We don't believe that first-time user experiences should handhold players through all of the processes and reveal the world, so to speak, but just to give them a shallow touch for these systems so that they understand the concepts and essentially how to navigate. – Steven Sharif

Tutorial systems

Tutorial systems are intended to be in place for Alpha-2.

We do intend to have and this is for entrance criteria of Alpha-2 a trigger response when players engage with certain systems for the first time, or when they are entering a certain area for the first time, or entering a node for the first time, that they will be able to be prompted with information about how they should go about first-time user experience sort-of-thing. That is going to obviously help orient players to the different systems within the game, because there are many. – Steven Sharif

Game balance

The way that the systems are being designed from a balancing standpoint we're taking into account how we would like the nodes to change per-se how often and we've designed attrition systems for certain cultures that may have more dominance over others. These are things that in Alpha and Beta we will be testing and watching and making sure that our objective is achieved from a gameplay standpoint and if it's not we'll come back and recalculate. – Steven Sharif

Siege balance

There are points of balance that we want to incorporate, such as the defense mechanisms that the defenders have, the types of buffs that are acquired through completing killing the bosses, or capturing control points, the stages before a siege when it comes to those node progressions in the preceding weeks: Those are all going to be balanced considering all things being equal between the two sides. But obviously we're not going to control the state of gear acquisition that one side might have as an advantage over the other. There might be a much better geared team over there. There might be a much better coordinated team. There might be a higher number of individuals who are part of the attacking or the defense. Those are components that we aren't necessarily going to put on railroads so-to-speak. But the aspects of design that we can talk about like the hit point health of a particular wall or door, or mercenaries that can be hired; what's their cost, what's their damage output: Those are things yes we're going to balance. But obviously anything that's player dependent or that has player interaction and activity and determination you can't always balance; and you don't want to balance. Those aspects you leave those to the players. – Steven Sharif

Class balance

Game balance in Ashes of Creation is group focused not based on 1v1 combat.

Q: As we start to see more talent trees and abilities I wonder how Ashes of Creation will handle unique playstyles and (maybe) "different" builds. For example, will we see (unique) Items and/or enchants which support a "Health instead of mana as resource" build? With class skill trees, augments, and weapon talent trees, won't there be too many playstyles to balance?

A: Will there be a variety? Yes, there will be many varieties. The the approach with regards to a player being able to customize how their archetype and how their weapon and choices and gear choices interact with the broader ecosystem of other players and the encounter designs is to provide maximum flexibility for the types of decisions you can make as a player. Those are the types of scenarios I find most intriguing from a balance perspective, where historically what we've talked about is we're not trying to balance everything. That is not the goal. This is definitely not a goal for it to be balanced in a 1v1 scenario. Our balance is definitely more focused around group composition. And when we say 'group composition', what we mean is having present a number of the archetypes; and those archetypes aren't going to stand on equal footing with each other. There is going to be a rock-paper-scissors design when it comes to innate advantages that certain archetypes have over each other; and giving or affording the customization options lets you flirt a bit with where your rock-paper-scissor lines live. Perhaps you are a little bit better against the rock, as a scissor would normally be; and that's because you've made certain selections in either your archetype skill tree, your passives, your weapon selection, your gear choices: Those are all pieces of a puzzle that interact with the overarching balance choices between these different rock-paper-scissor designs. So, I think modern MMO gameplay has has moved away from that. They want everyone to harness the same power from a 1v1 perspective and I don't find that interesting. – Steven Sharif

• 1v1 matchups will have a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, where one build will be superior to another. Different skills, passives, weapon skills, and gear choice selections allows players to 'flirt' the line with rock-paper-scissors balancing.

There will be match ups in 1v1s where one class will be superior to another; and that application should be a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. We want there to be counter-play between the different classes... Instead it's going to be a group focused balance, where as long as you have the diversity of classes present, that's going to be an equal level playing field. It's going to be very dependent on skill and strategy. – Steven Sharif

• Several factors are at play when balancing combat skills.

Balance-wise, there's a number of different interactions mechanically that you have within an ability that you can adjust in order to balance its power. The most most common ones are: Cooldown, Mana consumption, Damage done, Effect status conferred, Promotion of that effect status, Range. – Steven Sharif

• Alpha-1 testing was focused on core functionality rather than combat balance.
• Alpha-2 testing will begin to focus on balancing once populations and encounters have been put in place and are deep in testing.

When we move into Alpha 2 and we have a lot of data that's supporting the use of these particular abilities in combat settings, how often they're used, how often they result in death, what the average damage done by this archetype is comparatively to other damage done by different archetypes: All of that data gets logged and all of that data gets queried in order for us to refine the abilities so that they live in the environment we want them to. Now, that's not to mean that we're going to have a perfect balance across the board between the archetypes. Again, we're taking a rock-paper-scissor approach to balance, which means that some archetypes will do better against other archetypes and vice versa; and we're also not creating an environment where we want to have 1v1 balance. We are focused around group balance. Group composition is important. – Steven Sharif

• The sixty four (64) classes are partitioned into eight primary archetypes. Balancing of active skills only relates to these eight primary archetypes.
  • There are four primary groups of augments assigned to each base archetype. Balancing of augments relates to the four augment groups for each of the eight archetypes.

• Certain secondary archetypes are capable of "bridging the gap" between their counterpart.

Even though augments do radically change the way your active skills provide you abilities, there's still a primary focus on the base archetype itself and not the 64 whole classes. – Steven Sharif

Certain archetypes are capable of moving the gap between their counterpart per-se. If I am a Tank archetype and a Mage is my counter, I can take a Mage secondary and bridge the divide slightly; and then move my identity that direction ever so slightly. – Steven Sharif

Power creep

The developers intend to limit power creep via item sinks, the lack of gear binding, and the absence of pay-to-win or pay-to-convenience in Ashes of Creation.

Read more...

Meta

A goal of Ashes of Creation is to emphasise micro metas that work for specific encounters, and de-emphasize macro metas that work for everything.

What we're doing with this approach is we're de-emphasizing a macro meta and instead emphasizing a micro meta. And the difference between the macro/micro is that on the micro level you have metas that might form based on each individual type of encounter or experience. And in those senses, yes, there's going to be a most optimal: There's going to be a best in slot. There's going to be whatever that pertains to that particular challenge rating. But there won't we there will not be an overarching meta that says from a macro level, hey, if you got this shit, you're good to go for everything. That's boring, that's unfulfilling, that is not interesting; and it is just something that that dumbifies the experience. – Steven Sharif

• The effectiveness of classes, skills and gear is going to depend on the adversary or the encounter. There will be optimal builds for different challenges and difficulty ratings. This design aims to avoid any obvious meta or "cookie-cutter" builds in Ashes of Creation.​

• Different challenges are presented dynamically to players based on node progression and destruction. Situations that are based on a rock-paper-scissors design will inspire a horizontal gear chase. These dynamic challenges will change from month to month, causing a shift in demand in the economy as different builds are required by the new content.

• Increasing difficulty ratings inspire more of a traditional vertical power progression that is common in other MMOs.

Oftentimes you just have a very vertical power scale and that determines chase, but when you have a variety of relevance across certain types of adversaries and that variety changes over time because of player activity- and then that affects the economy and the crafter system and who was producing what for what demand- and everything gets shaken up. That's a very fun environment to exist in. It presents a more dynamic situation rather than a quote-unquote cookie-cutter type selection. – Steven Sharif

• The intricacies of how nodes interact with predicates in the world means that it may be possible but difficult to achieve meta server builds.

Q: Do you have any concerns on players eventually discovering a meta server build with nodes due to players heading to specific nodes and regions because they find that content more enjoyable; and if so how would you go about getting players to shift around the world to break up the meta?

A: I think it's interesting if players have a concerted effort across a server to interact with one another, learn from their actions, mistakes, successes, and effectuate that on the server. That's interesting, but I don't believe we'll see a meta form. I think that the intricacies are too great when it comes to how predicates are formed in order to elicit world state changes. – Steven Sharif

Synergies

Synergies exist between class skills, weapon skills, passive skills, proc effects, and status conditions. These synergies also apply to active skills from other characters.

Different abilities put status effects on creatures and then you can exploit those. Not only you can exploit that, anybody who's fighting with you can exploit them. – Margaret Krohn

Q: How much do you intend for those sort of synergy things to be done within one class, one character's kit, versus how much do you intend for them to be working with the other characters, the other archetypes and specializations to promote their things, or to also make sure you don't step on their feet and accidentally promote something they're trying to maximize?

A: When we talk about status conditions or keyword conditions and the promotion of those effects, there is going to be the bread and butter that each class kid has access to; and when they're creating the type of rotation with their ability system, they're going to want to emphasize those interactions that amplify or promote a particular type of status condition. So they'll have within the kit to their own interactions that they'll be able to leverage. But then in addition to that, they're going to have keyword status effects that help to either promote other classes' keyword status effects, or are the executed promotions of other classes initial status conditions. And when you think about the intent of the design: the intent of the design is that players are servicing themselves from a solo perspective when they want to go out and solo grind and solo experience and fulfill the quests. But when they come together to form a party to encounter group content, or a raid to encounter raid content: that the interconnectivity between those classes synergizes with these keyword promotions and/or effects; and there's a way to execute on that, that is successful and is effective, or a way that's not. And that's the skill ceiling/skill cap that requires interaction and cooperation and synchronization between, because there are limited time windows in which those keywords can get emphasized or executed upon when utilizing the ability. – Steven Sharif

When you think about it, it's very much a musical endeavor. When you think about a symphony or a concert, those instruments working with eachother to formulate this highly effective and very visceral experience of this music chain. When you accomplish that in combat, it's going to be noticeable; and that's the desire, is let's reward- let's dopamine hit when players are effective in their skill when executing on these ideas. – Steven Sharif

Payment model

Box cost

There is no upfront box cost associated with Ashes of Creation.

Nobody should feel that they have to back the project to see it come to life. It's coming to life regardless of that. You do it because you want to support us and that's fine; and if you don't want to, that's also fine as well. We want to hear your voice and we want you to be part of the community, so that's a very important aspect. Nothing we offer in the pre-order packages are power driven. They don't give any competitive advantage to an individual who backs the game. – Steven Sharif

Subscription model

Game time was previously purchasable in Pre-order packs.

This allows us to avoid the pay to win mentality many free-to-play games employ, as well as maintain a steady flow of new content for all our players.

Ashes of Creation (the MMORPG) is a subscription-only game with no box cost.

• The monthly subscription fee is USD $14.99.

• There will be no region locking, but certain regions will have "harmonized" subscription prices that better reflect their local economies. Harmonized regions will be segregated from other regions.

Certain regions will have "harmonized" subscription prices that better reflect their local economies. Harmonized regions will be segregated from other regions. – Ry Schueller

• Lifetime subscriptions were granted to crowdfunding backers at the Braver of worlds level or higher. These will never be available again.

• Subscriptions will begin at launch or, subject to change, a user may be able to choose to activate their subscription to start at a particular point in time.
  • Game time (earned through crowdfunding and pre-order packs) will not begin counting down until the game is released.

I think a sub cost provides both the barrier of entry to prevent, some not all, but mitigate some gold selling bots and whatnot because there's a cost associated with playing the game, but it's also not too high that it gets on the greedy side or prevents a lot of players from participating and trying the game; and then if the game is good then people will continue to subscribe and that subscription provides funding and revenue for the developers to continue a significant content creation and expansion rollout for the game. – Steven Sharif

• Ashes of Creation Apocalypse was free-to-play.

There is no P2W in Apocalypse or the MMORPG!

Expansions

DLC expansions (post-launch releases) are planned on a monthly, quarterly, or six-monthly basis.

• The frequency and size of expansions will be based on the popularity and subscription base of the game.

• DLC will not cost anything more than the normal subscription.

• Larger expansions will add new content and increase various aspects of the game.
  • Increased level cap.
  • New gear sets.
  • New zones.
  • New bosses.
  • New skill levels.
  • Increased power levels.
  • Gear upgrades.

• New content will primarily be introduced through the node system. The goal is for existing content to remain relevant alongside the new content.

• Expansions provide an opportunity for the developers to evaluate ways to unlock content that was not readily experienced by players in the previous release.

Each inflection point, which is those updates as expansions... you get to go back reevaluate. Hey, it seems like 89% of the servers out there never opened this door. Well, maybe the predicates were too granular. Maybe they were too focused. Maybe there's a reason why that didn't happen? Let's expand on that for the next expansion so that this content has an opportunity to come out and see the light of day. – Steven Sharif

Pay to win

Ashes of Creation will not be pay to win.

Ashes of Creation will not be pay to win, that is our pledge to the community. One of the core principles we set forth with Ashes of Creation is a very strong desire to maintain the game's even playing field.

A lot of developers and companies have come along in the past- and I've been hit by this too- and they've said we're not going to have pay-to-win and then boom they roll out some pay-to-win. We have consistently said we won't be pay-to-win and in the pre-orders that we provide and even in the Kickstarter there were absolutely zero pay-to-win components whatsoever. So not only will we talk the talk but we will walk the walk as well. – Steven Sharif

Because we are a non-box purchase game, meaning there is no box price to play Ashes of Creation, it is only a subscription; and that's beneficial because it reduces the barrier of entry and we want a high population obviously; but at the same time one of the ways we augment the revenue flows to sustain constant updates and new chapter releases and additional content within the game is through a cosmetic-only marketplace; and that means absolutely no pay-to-win whatsoever; and that will be adhered to forever. – Steven Sharif

Inventory slots, RNG loot boxes and XP potions are considered pay-to-win.

• There will not be level boosts or auto-leveling.
• There will not be a loot box system in Ashes of Creation.

We will not use a loot box system for cosmetics either. We currently have a cosmetic store that offers limited time, limited quantity items to help sustain game development. These items are purely decorative and do not offer any in-game benefits.

• Multiple accounts and multi-boxing on separate computers is not currently considered pay-to-win.

My definition of pay-to-win is really anything that affects the in-game economy, the in-game action pool, your abilities and/or skills... In my opinion the inventory slots and the XP potions would be considered pay-to-win. – Steven Sharif

• Items sold in the store that are also obtainable through gameplay are still considered pay-to-win.

It undermines an achievement when you remove the need to achieve it. – Steven Sharif

Q: Will there be RNG boxes?

A: I dislike RNG. Archeage made me loath rng monetization gimmicks. – Steven Sharif

Publishers

Intrepid Studios will self-publish Ashes of Creation in the NA (North American), OCE (Oceanic) and SEA (Southeast Asia) regions.

• Intrepid Studios will be opening offices in Amsterdam to help support their publishing operations in the EU (European Union) and CIS regions.

We have learned a lot from our partnership with MY.GAMES, and we wish our friends there all the best as we have mutually decided to part ways. Looking ahead, we’re excited to announce that Intrepid Studios will be opening European offices in Amsterdam to help support our publishing operations in the EU/CIS regions. We have recently posted open positions for our new EU offices, and look forward to hiring the best and brightest in true Intrepid fashion. – Steven Sharif

The Ashes of Creation MMORPG will not be published on the Steam platform.

• Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale early access testing ended on March 10, 2020. It was previously available for download on the official website and on Steam.

NFTs

Intrepid Studios does not plan to introduce NFTs or any other type of play-to-earn mechanics into Ashes of Creation.

To be really clear, we have no plans to have NFTs in Ashes of Creation, or any other "play-to-earn" mechanics.

Cosmetic store (micro transactions)

Ashes of Creation cosmetic store.

There is going to be legendary cosmetics that can be earned and achieved in the game through the game systems, but that's going to take a significant amount of effort and work; and those cosmetics are going to be on-par with the cosmetics offered in the marketplace... What that does is it provides additional revenue to the company so that we can continue to fund the development of content as well and bridge the divide that not having a box cost would have and not having any pay-to-win mechanics whatsoever. – Steven Sharif

The Cosmetic store enables players to purchase Cosmetics for use in Ashes of Creation. The cosmetic store offers limited time, limited quantity items to help sustain game development.

• Equitable cosmetics, both from a quantity and quality standpoint, are achievable through in-game means.
• Nothing in the cosmetic store will be pay to win.

Nothing in our shop will ever be pay to win as we believe this practice greatly hurts the MMORPG genre.

• Cash shop cosmetics will offer a diverse selection of unique looks.

I want to incentivize purchase in the cosmetic shop for sustainability of what expansions we have intended, since we are not a box cost. I want to incentivize purchase by offering limited items: limited time, limited quantity, so you have confidence that when you purchase them, they won't be offered later on in some other way. – Steven Sharif

• All cosmetic store items will be non-tradeable. There will be no gifting mechanism for cosmetic items.

I don't want cosmetic items that can be purchased from the market to be transferable... because it is in a way a transfer of money for potentially something in-game. – Steven Sharif

Skins

Cinderhorn Steer pre-order pack cosmetic mount skin.

Providing these limited options that collectors out there like when it comes to achieving and/or purchasing cosmetics. It means something I think when players make that decision to purchase or they go through the rigorous portion of achieving those things in game that it is not just everywhere around them and becomes meaningless at that point. – Steven Sharif

Accessories/armor, Buildings, Caravans, Mounts, Pets, and Ships sold in the cosmetic store are skins.

• Skins are cosmetic items that do not grant the user any benefit.

• Skins are only be able to be applied to things that have already been earned, crafted or found within Ashes of Creation.
  • Certain skins require specific items or item tiers have been achieved in-game before they can be used.

Owning cosmetics does not guarantee the acquisition of the item the cosmetic can be used on. Players must still achieve the corresponding item/building. – Steven Sharif

• The lore on store cosmetics is flavor text.

• Caravan skins change the appearance of an in-game mount and in-game caravan that are hooked up to each other.
  • The caravan and mount skin components are not able to be utilized separately.

• The best skins will be in-game achievable.

The best skins will be in-game achievable (obviously “best” is subjective, so I’d say the most ornate and detailed/unique). – Steven Sharif

Read more...

Artistic style

Ren'Kai architecture concept art.

Part of the biome that the Ren'Kai are accustomed to is a more swamp or marsh oriented, so they have these almost stilt-like foundations on some of the assets because they're intended to sit above that marsh. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation will have a higher graphical fidelity than most western games. It will not be too stylized or "cartoony".

We can push the limits a little bit on the graphical fidelity, especially using Unreal Engine 4... My desire was not to see very cartoony games. I'm not a big fan of highly stylized art. – Steven Sharif

• The game will not have steampunk elements.

It's not to say that people can't do steampunk well. I've enjoyed some steampunk stuff. I'm a very high fantasy oriented type of storyteller; and the inspiration for Ashes obviously comes from my pathfinder campaigns that I ran long ago; and those are always set in a high fantasy world. So it just compromises what I believe is the perspective of the storytelling in the environment. – Steven Sharif

• Intrepid Studios does not use AI for art production.

We do not use AI for production, except in unique internal cases when communicating fast reference material. – Steven Sharif

Artistic influences

Asian influenced Ren'Kai architecture.

Character races are super important. These are the choices that we make at the onset of our adventure in an MMORPG: what race- not just mechanically aligns with our decisions, if those races have game mechanics behind them from a stat perspective, but visually and culturally and historically: What are these? What do these races represent? So it's important that visually they're distinct. And everyone's seen fantasy games do Elves, so everyone's seen them do Humans, everyone's seen them do Orcs: There's an established expectation almost behind what these traditional fantasy races represent; and there's a risk, because whenever you're creating a new IP or a new story or a new world- a new Universe; a realm in which things don't have to always be the norm, you can take a little bit of creative liberty to redefine some of the aspects of a particular race; and that can be a good thing, because it's something that is new to players. It's something that is unique to the realm that we're building- the surroundings that you have. So what we wanted to do was push a little bit more on the unique side of what the Py'rai would look like from a visual perspective. – Steven Sharif

• Aelan architecture has a French medieval influence. Lion iconography is a core feature of Aelan history.
• Dünir have a Nordic cultural influence.
• Empyreans have a Greco-Roman imperialistic feeling.
• The Kaelar have a European influence.
• The Niküa have a Polynesian influence.
• The Py'Rai have a Navajo Native American influence. Py'Rai architecture has a woodland inspiration.
• Pyrian architecture has a Greco-Roman influence.
• Ren'Kai architecture has an Asian influence.
• The Vaelune have a Middle Eastern influence.
• The Vek have a Mesoamerican influence.

You will see in the different races that are available from a player character standpoint a lot of different influences that reflect many cultures in the world: Not just European, not just Africa, not Mesoamerican. These cultures are going to be present in many of the races. – Steven Sharif

The idea is just to find a base component in the real world as a starting point and then to begin to fantasize. – Steven Sharif

Cultural references

There will be real-world cultural references, particularly with regards to real-world holidays and historical events.

• These won't be out of place in terms of immersion. They will be homages.

ESRB rating

Dead bodies in a Pre-alpha raid encounter.

Some people were asking if there was an update on the rating that's intended for Ashes of Creation, and it will be Mature; and part of that you're starting to see get riddled throughout here. Not just in the narrative design and dialogue, but also just in the setting having more morbid, grotesque looking spaces. – Steven Sharif

The goal is for Ashes of Creation to have a M for Mature ESRB rating. The goal was previously to aim for a T for Teen rating.

Q: At this beginning of this project you said that you were aiming for the game to be rated T for Teen. Is that still the goal?

A No. I believe that that our game will be rated M for Mature based on some of the narratives and content that we are implementing. – Steven Sharif

• There may be an option to turn off blood and gore in the game.
• There probably won't be swearing in quests.

Game difficulty

Ashes of Creation will be on the higher side of difficulty when it comes to engagements.

Adventuring is not easy in Ashes... The intent is that encounters are difficult. The world is dangerous. It is not a cakewalk to progress within Ashes. – Steven Sharif

Learning curve

Ashes of Creation will be easy to understand yet hard to master.

My stance on participation trophies is that things should be hard, people should fail, the bitter taste of defeat is what makes success that much more rewarding. Helping other players learn encounter strategy, and fine tuning their play style for high end content is an important part of eliminating participation trophy. Growing together is a good thing, and that include failing together as a means to drive for success together. – Steven Sharif

Q: How important will knowledge and deduction be in the game, and will you avoid tedious data gathering methods?

A: Knowledge and deduction should be pretty important, both from an encounter design perspective with regards to enemy NPC behaviors, but also certain puzzles and questlines. The intent there is to create an interactive style of gameplay that requires problem solving, deduction across the board, especially as it relates to certain crafting results. I mean that's something that's riddled across [the] general design playing field for a lot of our systems. We don't want it to be tedious. If it's something that you're doing that doesn't feel fun, then from a relevant standpoint it's not what we want to incorporate in the gameplay loop. – Steven Sharif

Target demographic

The developers want Ashes of Creation to appeal to both younger and older generations of MMO gamers.

I think our target demographic, obviously we have a very high graphic fidelity in the game that's attractive to younger players, but at the same time we have a very roleplay game orientation - a a play back to that pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons feel that perhaps younger generations may not know but is very near and dear to the hearts of older gamers. So I think we have a broad appeal from a demographic standpoint. – Steven Sharif

Player types

Ashes of Creation will cater for a variety of player types from Raiders or PvPers to Role players and Crafters.

The most compelling design argument for how those different sects of gamers interact with each other is dependant from the design standpoint of interdependencies in the systems. So, for example if as a Raider or as a PvPer you're looking for the best gear, you're going to devote your time towards leveling up and going out and participating in the things you enjoy like pvping, perhaps going for caravans or sieging cities and castles and all that type stuff. If you want the best gear, you're going to have to rely on a person who's devoted their time towards crafting potentially; and they may not be a PvPer but they have a place in your wheelhouse because you need their services. And then that crafter is going to need a person who is either a gatherer or plays the economy as a merchant in the nodes with the auction houses that are regionalized. They're going to have to work with a person who specializes in trade that takes caravans with either mercenary groups or other guilds that are PvPers between the nodes to get the resources they need. Building dependencies on different groups or factions of players that exist within a large world like this MMORPG is what solidifies the bonds that allow for them to exist either harmoniously, or at least in a way that they know you need those types of players. – Steven Sharif

Casual vs. hardcore players

The multiple progression paths in Ashes of Creation are designed to suit different playstyles and offer different "lanes" for players depending on the time they have available to play.

• Some progression paths will be more immediately achievable, which are more suited to casual players.
  • Triggered events such as cravans and sieges will allow casual players to participate in impactful events without significant time investment.
  • Lower level characters will have usefulness in mass combat that does not depend on their level, such as manning siege weapons, helping repair fortifications, bringing proximity-based buffs to key positions, using stealth or scaling walls. These types of things are relevant to the tide of battle and do not require the player to be max-level or have high combat stats.

There are events that are happening in the world in the game that you won't need to be a hardcore player to impact and join. For example, the triggered events from the PvE standpoint against the cities; the trades of the caravans; those natural battlegrounds that exist; the castle sieges you can login for. There is a lot of systems that are at play where a person can simply log in, participate, have fun, be impactful and then log out. – Steven Sharif

• Other progression paths will require a significant time investment, which casual players will take longer to achieve than hardcore players.
  • The contribution of a large mass of casual players working together may have a greater impact on node progression than hardcore players. Hardcore players may be able to progress into to late-game content faster than casual players, but may lack the numbers to influence the nodes in those locations as quickly as the larger population of casual players.

Traditionally in MMORPGs you're going to see a larger population of casual players than you do of hardcore players; and that's just the way the cookie crumbles from a population standpoint. And because of that and the way that nodes collect experience and advance as a result of player activity, those casual players will actually have more impact on node progression than the hardcore players will: at least as I predict, because of the sheer quantity disproportionate between the two different groups of people... You may see in Ashes the smaller hardcore group of players progress further into the late-game content, right. But they don't have the numbers to influence the nodes in those locations as quickly as the more casual... larger population has near the outskirts. – Steven Sharif

Solo players

Alpha-2 solo PvE ranger combat.

Ashes of Creation provides gameplay options for solo oriented players.

For those solo players who don't really care about finding a community to play with but they want to have one when they need it, there's going to be a lot of opportunities from a dialogue perspective, in-game chat options; you can join as part of citizenships: there's a lot of pseudo factions there- social organizations that give you an in to other players without the strong bonds that typically come with guild-oriented organizations; and I think that that's a comfortable medium between the two. – Steven Sharif

• Certain quest lines and hunting grounds are devoted towards solo players.
• Node citizenship and social organizations provide the ability to interact without the strong bonds that typically come with guild-oriented organizations.
• Mechanics exist within larger conflicts for small groups and solo players to impact the battle.
  • This includes systems that will likely focus on single group sized participants while the larger battle is occurring.

• A shorter TTK is expected to help solo players and smaller groups compete with larger groups or zergs.

Open development

Intrepid Studios has embraced an open (transparent) development approach, rather than sharing information through carefully curated press releases and announcements.

• Player feedback is important, but the developers will not change what they consider to be the core identity and vision for the game.

Player feedback is important, however the identity and the vision of the game is not up for discussion; and so when we talk about the core systems and tenets and philosophies behind what the game that we're trying to make is, we believe that the game we are trying to make resonates with a large enough section of the MMORPG player base that it is a sustainable and profitable venture for us to create that core game. Now, the ancillary systems that live around the core philosophy of Ashes of Creation, or the subtleties and what we need to do in order to make a particular system or feature better... that we want to collect player feedback. – Steven Sharif

• Some game aspects will be more polished than others before they are presented.

The delicate blend between a transparent development process, but also understanding that [the] majority of your player audience will not grasp, or will not take into context, what a work in progress looks like. So certain things we have to polish to the point where they're presentable; where they can be understood- again in its own context without my verbal support or Margaret's verbal support. – Steven Sharif

I think that we live in an age where it's easy to be transparent if you're not trying to hide something. The downside is if you're showing something that's not a completed or finished product, it is incumbent upon the viewer to understand that fact. – Steven Sharif

• The purpose of transparent development is to enable participation and feedback from the community without the need to purchase access.

The whole purpose of our development process being transparent being open is that you don't have to buy a package actually to participate. You can be a voice from the community. You can observe people playing. You can give your experiences and feedback. – Steven Sharif

I don't answer to a board. I don't answer to a publisher. We answer to our players; and we try to be as transparent as possible with showing our progress; and showing it in a timely manner. – Steven Sharif

• Certain aspects of the game will not be revealed early to avoid spoilers.

There are obviously going to be some aspects of the development that we will not reveal, like lore and some system mechanics in order not to spoil the game for release. – Steven Sharif

Localization/Translation

Ashes of Creation is aiming to be available in the following languages: English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese.

• Previously it was stated that English, French, German, and Russian will be supported then Italian, Polish and Spanish be added later.
• Other languages are being considered based on interest.
• User interface localization tools are available in the chat window.
• The AI voiceover solution is expected to be able to adapt to localization into multiple languages.

The current plan is for Ashes of Creation to be available in the following languages: English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese. Although this may not be the final list of languages we support, we are still looking at which other languages into which the game may be translated.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Servers won't be language locked.

• There may be separate servers in the EU region based on language type.

Platforms

Ashes of Creation will be released on the Windows PC platform.

• Console support may be added at a later point.
• Native Linux support may be possible in future.

Q: Will the upgrade to UE5 affect the supported systems? A lot of people are like linux question mark.

A: It's something that we'll evaluate in the future. I haven't ruled it out necessarily- would see how much work it would take to do that, but really like less than one percent of the player base is using Linux. – Steven Sharif

Performance

Performance optimization when rendering 1300 simulated actors utilizing merged materials and meshes in Unreal Engine 5 Nanite. This test was confirmed post-stream to be running on a RTX 3070.

What you're seeing here showcases the new modular appearance component which can combine any set of meshes and materials into a single mesh and single material at run-time. What you're looking at is over 1300 different entities, different actors. These are simulated players essentially. Previously you saw the example they were just standing still. There was no animation, there was no effects, there was no environment and it was a thousand. This is thirteen hundred playing animations, playing effects, plus the environment which is Nanite in this example. So what you're seeing is all of these players moving around and doing something and you're seeing the frame rate at about 30 on Clayton's rig. – Steven Sharif

Here you see that the FPS in the top right corner is like seven or eight on average, so not too good from a rendering perspective... So by merging now you can see that the same thousand players who are wearing the same armors as previously are actually having a 300 percent increase- 300 to 400 increase- in the performance of the of the FPS. So it went from 7 to about 21 on average and that is a significant optimization point that obviously this is just the beginning of the optimization efforts. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation was performing at 50-60 FPS on a 1080 Ti during early Alpha-1 testing.

• Game settings allow players to fine tune performance to suit their preferences and hardware capabilities.

• A "default player appearance" may be automatically applied during sieges or other large scale battles to improve client-side performance.

• Animations that aren't significant to gameplay may be throttled to improve client performance.

Alpha system requirements

Alpha-1 stress testing, March 17, 2021.

These are fully operational NPCs. They have behavior trees, they have AI blackboards; they are functioning as an NPC would; and to my surprise, to everyone's surprise actually, the server handled it quite well: 5000 entities all within a very dense area. – Steven Sharif

Minimum and recommended computer specifications for Alpha-2.

Minimum Specs - 1080p

• Processor: Intel i5 8400 | AMD Ryzen 5 2600
• Memory: 12GB
• Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1070 or equivalent
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 100GB SSD Storage
• Windows 10/11

Recommend Specs - 1440p

• Processor: Intel i7 8700 | AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Memory: 16GB
• Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 3070 or equivalent
• DirectX: Version 12
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 100GB SSD Storage
• Windows 10/11

Please note that these requirements will change throughout our testing phases.

Unreal Engine 5

Unreal Engine 5 walkthrough.

Lumen has done a great job in really bringing to to life this area. As you can see, there's light bouncing off of the surfaces and casting into the rest of the cave... I love how you can also see the detail in the costume and the cloth that we have now. – Steven Sharif

Unreal Engine 5 is the graphical engine for Ashes of Creation. The game was originally developed in Unreal Engine 4. Migrating to UE5 early is expected to save time the long run compared to upgrading closer to release, or post-release.

• The recommended system specs for the game have not changed for Unreal Engine 5.

• Unreal Engine 5 enables improved forms of locomotion/animation (motion warping), such as crouching, tilting and mantling.

What it provides in my opinion as person who enjoys PvP is it adds additional dynamics to what is possible from your opponent or from yourself. You know, if there is a ledge and jumping off that ledge is going to deal a lot of damage to me when I hit the ground and that puts me at a significant disadvantage, maybe I have an option to jump off the ledge at a point where I can mantle onto the side of a cliff or something. Now the give and take there is I won't be able to use my skills while I'm mantled. I won't be able to react easily, but I didn't have to take the fall damage per-se. Or if there's an obstruction and I'm going to take a significant reduction in speed so that I can crouch and make it past that, and now I have a effective line of sight has been obstructed as a result of that decision. I think it adds interesting elements to the battlefield and the key here is going to be making sure that it's not cumbersome- that it doesn't feel opposite of the flow of combat. – Steven Sharif

• Unreal Engine 5 Lumen provides enhanced global illumination

Lumen is going to greatly improve the visual fidelity and performance of the game with the reduced work and effort that's required by the art team, making Ashes of Creation much more beautiful than in UE4. – Steven Sharif

• Nanite enables increased graphical fidelity in the game (without excessive overhead).

Nanite brings us really an entirely new approach to rendering and art workflows. Now we can render more actors with extremely high detail while eliminating the need to bake out normal map textures. For artists essentially what this means is that they can import high quality sculpted meshes directly into Unreal 5 without really having to reduce the poly count, making the workflow more efficient while simultaneously improving the quality of the art. – Steven Sharif

• Features (such as World partitions and One file per actor) make it much easier for multiple developers to work together.
  • World partitions also enable Unreal Engine 5 maps to exceed the map size constraints of UE4 (~20 kilometers squared).

Q: How does this upgrade to UE5 affect the Ashes of Creation release timeline?

A: While UE4 is a great engine, there are certain focuses and technological endeavors that Epic is doing on UE5 that won't necessarily be supported by UE4; and we want to make sure given the lifespan of Ashes and how long we intend this MMO to last, that when we made this decision early on during the development process that we weren't going to exacerbate the amount of effort it would take to move over later in the lifespan or after launch. – Steven Sharif

• Ashes of Creation features a custom network back-end with proprietary Unreal Engine networking code to enable mass combat in the open world: such as PvP, Node sieges, Castle sieges, Dungeons and World bosses.
  • The upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 was primarily a change to the front-end side of the game. The custom back-end networking code remains largely unaffected.

• As of January 24, 2022 all teams have moved over to Unreal Engine 5.
  • The developers were able to transition to Unreal Engine 5.1.1 in February 2023 as part of milestone 4.
  • The upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.2 was completed. The developers expect to start upgrading to 5.3 around the end of 2023.
  • At some point the developers intend to stop updating Unreal Engine until post-launch. This decision will be based on careful consideration of potential delays and other risks.

Q: What is your stance in regards to focusing on delivering an MVP versus continuously upgrading your tools and engine to deliver a better product with new tech, even if that results in delays or additional years of development like UE 5.2, maybe 5.3 etc?

A: Our technical teams, especially our network team, our ICS teams, our gameplay engineering teams, they convene and weigh when our next update should be on the engine side: What new technologies might bring benefit overall. My perspective on how we balance the need for integration of new technology versus the responsibility we have in a timely manner to provide testing sessions that get us closer to the launch date; that's a delicate balance. I would say generally our disposition is not to incorporate new technologies that yield some significant amount of delay on the development side. We very much take the perspective that we're capable of adjusting and/or integrating those new technologies post-milestone, post-launch if necessary. At some point we'll stop updating the Unreal Engine in development until launch. That point hasn't come yet, but of course the larger the project grows and on the more custom we make the engine for our back-end needs; and for whatever else merge conflicts can occur- those mergers can become big and painful; and the update process gets more painful. So to answer your question shortly, we have a team that evaluates what direction we need to take there; and at the top of my mind is always, let's not incorporate delays as a result of leveraging new technologies. – Steven Sharif

Servers

Servers (also referred to as Server realms) in Ashes of Creation are located in various IRL regions of the world.

• The game world will be the same on each server realm, but Nodes will develop differently. Different servers will have different narratives. Things that happen on one server may not happen on another.

To answer your question about "what stops all servers from from progressing the same nodes," the answer to that question is "other players." Certain content is locked behind different nodes that develop. If we assume that at some point all of the information regarding node progression is available, not all players on a server may agree on what content they want access to, or that they want other players to have access to. Even if a certain perks from node progression are considered "best value" to players trying to solve a node meta, that doesn't mean all players on a server benefit from that in the same way. Because of this, some players make act against your best interests, because it isn't their best interest. Nodes define (and redefine) the world around you, influence points of interest, world quest lines, story arcs, drop tables, resource pools, and even spawn tables for NPCs and bosses. The cycle of nodes leveling and triggering events is something we expect to see play out in a variety of different ways, across different servers, based on how players choose to play Ashes of Creation. – Ry Schueller

• Servers will be named after the champions of the great battles that led up to the fall of Verra.
  • Server selection will show the region where the server is located and/or the ping to that server.

With regards to live launch when the server's go live, you'll be selecting a server to play on; and that will be your character's home; and that server you'll be aware of where that server is located usually by either a ping or a region that's notated on next to the server. – Steven Sharif

• The developers may occasionally release stats relating to server populations and archetype/class makeup, but there isn't going to be an official page that surfaces this information.
  • Stats are available on a per-guild basis, subject to a permissions structure.

• Server-firsts will be able to be captured and collected on memory fragments that players can collect in-game so they may relive their experiences.

• Server realms utilize Intrepid Net server meshing technology to break up a single realm server into multiple game servers to greatly improve server performance.

Regions

Ashes of Creation will launch in the following regions:

• North America (NA).
• Europe (EU).
• Asia/Pacific (SEA).
• Oceania (OCE) (Australia).
  • The likelihood is very high for Sydney or Melbourne based OCE servers.
  • OCE servers may not be provisioned until Beta.

At this stage we do not have numbers on how many different servers will exist for different regions. We've said in the past 8-10,000 concurrent users per server is what we'd like to aim for. Obviously, the number of servers that exist in a region are going to be dependent on the population that's playing. – Steven Sharif

• Other server regions will be considered based on interest.
  • South America is under consideration due to traffic from that region.

Once we get closer to launch we'll update this information, which may include additional regions.

• Certain regions will have "harmonized" subscription prices that better reflect their local economies. These regions will be segregated from other regions.
  • Players will be able to make characters on any server they wish. There will be no region locking (outside of harmonized regions).

Folks have always been able to make characters on any server they wish. We are not region locking anyone. – Margaret Krohn

Server population

Population limits will be enforced on each server realm.

• Around 8-10k concurrent users (CCU) per realm is projected.
  • Initially there will be a limited number of registered accounts (approximately 15,000) per realm to help mitigate login queues.
  • This limit will increase over time to around 50,000 registered accounts per realm.
  • Alpha-2 phase-1 is expected to support 3,000+ concurrent users per realm. This is expected to ramp up to 8-10k as testing progresses.
• There may be queues to get into high population realms, but the aim is to avoid excessively long queues.
  • The queueing system will be present starting in Alpha-2 phase 1.
• The developers intend to carefully manage realm populations via the use of character creation throttles to avoid the need to merge servers.
• The developers may occasionally release stats relating to realm populations and archetype/class makeup, but there isn't going to be an official page that surfaces this information.

Q: What is your plan and what systems are in place to avoid the first few months of server queues and congestion; and when players drop off, how do you plan on handling that when the time comes?

A: I think that obviously is a problem that every MMO launch suffers. That is the balance between your active users your expected peak concurrencies: where that fall-off begins and how you consolidate servers. You don't want to expand too much at the beginning to alleviate server queues and then end up with like 30% pop servers that you have to consolidate later. The same is going to be true for Alpha-2. So, we're going to be leveraging- obviously we know how many users we have available when it comes to Alpha-2 entrance and then as we allow additional people to purchase in with these new key sales that we'll be doing later, we're going to get an idea of what that is. Generally I would expect we're going to see 30 to 40% peak concurrencies when it comes to opening the servers, when it comes to prime-time, when it comes to events that happen. And, so when we talk about server queuing server congestion, we want to make sure that we have healthy Alpha-2 servers, so we're going to leverage server queuing as much as possible. That means that sometimes those server queues might get into the thousands during those peak times, during the servers spinning up, or during those prime times or events; and that's okay. It's not going to be the most fun for a lot of players to have to sit in a queue. Obviously, we've all done that before in MMOs that we played, but the alternative is that we have too many servers available, we don't have those queues during peak times; and then when it's not peak times those server populations dilapidate and that's not what we want to have obviously. – Steven Sharif

Server history

Map concept art.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

The history of each server realm will be tracked and visible to players in a node's library.

• This design may have changed.

We're gonna keep track of the history of the world so that we can tell people the story up to the current day. A player who's brand new, who's come in at the six-month mark can take a look at each server, what each server has done, how each server has tackled the storyline; and they can decide for themselves what community they want to join; what version of the world that they want to take part in. – Jeffrey Bard

• Scribes may be able to collect and record information about the events of the world as they see it from their point of view.

Server instancing

There won't be server channels (sharding) on a server realm.

Server types

• There won't be separate PvE and PvP servers but some servers may be more PvP focused than others.

• There won't be separate roleplaying (RP) servers.

Server transfers

Server transfers, outside of server merges, will not be possible initially.

• The developers intend to assess the impact on housing and other systems closer to launch.

Esports

Esports in Ashes of Creation.

Esports is not the main focus of Ashes of Creation, but the game may move in that direction if the gameplay is compelling, competitive, and fun.

What I would say as an MMO player is Esports tends to miss out on a core element that's unique to MMORPGs, which is progression; and it's difficult to represent that progression in the traditional Esports format that we see with other games and genres today. However, what I will say is that I have participated in some MMOs that have stood up cross-server competitions and I've really personally enjoyed those types of cross-server competitions where you bring the best that those individual servers have to offer with regards to groups, or teams, or constant parties as we like to call them; and you allow them to compete in an arena format, or in a castle siege format. Like that is super cool. I love that server versus server type of competition and I think that's where there is a potential to do something interesting with regards to Esports and the MMORPG genre. – Steven Sharif

Voice acting

• The developers have begun implementing AI-generated quest giver voiceovers in Alpha-2. Previously it was stated that the use of AI voice acting was under consideration. Prior to that it was stated that narrated quest lines were not currently planned for launch.
  • This AI solution is expected to be able to adapt to localization/translation into multiple languages.

In the past you've asked about is Intrepid taking a look at different AI solutions for some systems in the game and this is one of those systems: Voice over, where we have begun implementation. Obviously this is not fully polished. It doesn't have the right inflections in different spaces and some of the pauses that it needs, but it is a very capable system that will be delivering us some really good polished VO; and we are sourcing those voices in-house internally with our development team, which I think is a really cool thing to do. Obviously it gives us a personal space where people who who've worked to build this game get to actually exist in the game too. – Steven Sharif

• NPCs will have voice acted audio greetings and incantations.

• Certain bosses and creatures will have voice lines along with other audio cues.

Music

Alpha-2 Carphin Theme and Exploration work-in-progress music by Inon Zur.

Alpha-2 Nimble Dance Bard skill blending with ambient biome audio.

A lot of the Bard abilities, because they have so much musicality to them, we have to make sure that they stay ambient enough that they don't mess with the overall feel of the music, while also matching up in tonality and key for the musical ones. So, there's a lot of stuff going on, but I think we're doing a pretty good job of combining it so it feels in-world and in-place. – Tory Bader

Ashes of Creation's Lead Composer is Bear McCreary. His music will be unveiled in Alpha-2 and Beta-1.

• Inon Zur's music is currently in Alpha-2.

• Certain bosses and encounters will feature specific original sound tracks.

• Nodes will feature thematic music based on the dominant culture of the node.

• Biomes and POIs will have specific musical themes associated with them. The presence of certain story arcs may weave layers into the theme for that area.
  • Melodies are intended to blend harmoniously with other music in the environment, such as the biome and other skills.

If we're talking about biomes and we're talking about POIs: each of those will have distinctive themes that are associated with them. So when you're out in the wilderness, or you're out at a specific POI, those will have soundtracks that will play. As well, each of those systems will encompass a layered effect that can reflect the stage of certain types of events within an area. So, for example, the POI that is Carphen: that will have a general theme for Carphin that will play as you move into the area, but depending on the effects of a particular story arc we may weave in a layer of the soundtrack that reflects perhaps the voice of the raid boss when she's present. – Steven Sharif

• Combat states may also feature different musical themes.

• Music from Alpha-1 and on livestream Dev updates is placeholder music. It is not intended music for Ashes of Creation at launch.

The soundtrack is going to incorporate either elements of intrigue or mystery or horror that's part of winding through that level to get to that boss, it's building up to the crescendo of the fight. Music is such an important part of setting the scene- the emotional presence of what you are doing in this immersive world. It elicits emotional responses. And we have a great composer Bear McCreary who has worked on God of War, Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, Black Sails; a lot of great franchises and great IPs; and I think he is going to do an awesome job in capturing the essence of what that emotional response should be from a player. – Steven Sharif

• Intrepid Studios will own the rights to the music of Ashes of Creation.

When we put out any music in our game... we want content creators to be able to create content utilizing our game. So just message us and we'll try to resolve any of those [DMCA] problems if you encounter any. – Margaret Krohn

Game masters

Game masters (GMs) will be present and active in Ashes of Creation server realms.

On the customer service side, we do plan to have in game GMs. We do plan to service people in the best way possible. And we will grow our service team as much as we need as our player base grows. – Margaret Krohn

• Game masters are expected to be in-game at live launch. Some in-game support is expected to be present during Alpha-2 to handle a limited range of issues.

The direction that I'm taking Intrepid as a company in is that a significant portion of the revenue created by the game goes into not only creating additional content and updates for the game but also goes into I think caretaking, as I like to call it; and that caretaking is multiple things: It's having active and present GM's on servers. It's having a an interacting community team that is always present and on-call for participating in forum discussions and streams and updates. – Steven Sharif

• There will be a standard escalation system, where different actions are taken based on the seriousness of each infraction. Actions could range anywhere from being stripped (of the illegitimate items or currency) to being banned for a period of time, or being permanently banned.

Following a standard approach to an escalation system where certain infractions are immediate and automatic bans and some infractions provide a path forward where action is taken that might ban the account or strip the account or provide some chat bans or the ability to play over a week or so... If you buy gold and depending on the seriousness of the infraction you could go anywhere from being stripped and to being banned for a period of time to being permanently banned. – Steven Sharif

• Botters, cheaters, gold sellers, and RMTers, will face harsh penalties from the GM and community teams.

When a player takes their play experience to the point of harassing another player, and doing so on a repetitive basis, in order to diminish their play experience, it is a ticketable offense. If you are following around a streamer or you're following around a player and your intent is to keep them from playing the game or to force them to quit, that is a dirty player mindset. It's a bad player mindset. It's a griefer's mindset. It's not something that's desired in the ecosphere in the community of Ashes of Creation. And as a result, it is a serviceable customer service situation. That is where warnings are given and actions can be taken against the account holder of an individual whose sole purpose is to disrupt and affect negatively the gameplay experience of the game. – Steven Sharif

• Players that work outside of the game design to grief or harass other players are actionable by customer services.
  • For example, using abilities to repeatedly draw aggro from another player who is engaging with monsters is an actionable customer service ticket.

I believe that so far in development we have demonstrated the level of customer service and community engagement that will be on display after our live launch. You are right however in saying that many of these problems that can arise on the fringe of certain systems will require an active GM support team available to address problems that the user base encounters

• The volunteer moderator program will continue (post-launch).

Security systems

Security systems will be in place to combat cheating, exploiting, botting, gold selling/real money transactions (RMT), item duplication and other things that affect the economy starting from Alpha-0.

• A broad spectrum of approaches are going to be utilized in order to try to protect the integrity of the game once it launches. Testing of these systems will begin leading up towards Alpha-2.

Security is always at the top of any concern when you have a closed system like an MMO is... We've seen a lot of MMO is launch without security in place and the economy gets ruined as a result thereafter. And every band-aid that's slapped on top of that wound is just making things worse. And so part of why you take the time in order to ensure that things are done correctly is also the security component of things; and that's where testing with a live audience is a bit different also than testing with a Q&A audience as well, because you're going to get those bad actors- and we call them bad actors because ultimately they're attempting to destroy the fun for others... So what we've done is we've hired some security experts who've worked on massive other MMOs like World of Warcraft and other games, and they bring with them lot of experience; and we're going to be testing that in leading up towards Alpha-2. It's a very important part of Alpha-2. It's not something that we really addressed with Alpha-1 because again, that was a much more barebones functional testing experience. We did see some issues during Alpha-1 and we made it important for Alpha-2 to test those systems. We have a broad spectrum of approaches that we're going to be utilizing in order to try to protect the integrity of the game once it launches. – Steven Sharif

• These systems collect user data and flag abnormal activities for investigation. This combined with player reporting functions generates a live "heat map" that draws attention to unusual behavior.

We do have already built into the game on the outset is essentially behavioral metrics. So in the game, as a player does normal things and they acquire normal gold, that's all good and well, but if there starts to be item IDs that appear on the player account that are out of the norm, like either a large amount of gold, or significant legendary items, what it does in the back-end it flags the account for view so that we can take a look at where did this item come from. Is it coming from a known gold seller or a flagged bot, or whatever; and then we investigate. So we're going to be pretty hard on the ability for players to subvert the natural economy systems by RMT or botting. – Steven Sharif

• Botters, cheaters, gold sellers, and RMTers, will face severe penalties from the active GM/community team.

It's important to note that there is a sanctity that must be protected within the game from RMTing; and let me just go into a little diatribe about this: But in games that I've played where the company or the publisher does not enforce rules, it becomes the standard that you buy gold if you want to be competitive. If you want to compete at the top tier levels in certain games, and everyone's buying gold, you almost either have to buy the gold or you're just not going to be able to compete with those people and that's a really shitty feeling to have. Excuse my French, I apologize. That is sucky; and in order for that not to be the case it is the responsibility of the publisher or the developers both to make sure that we have stringent practices from a CS- from a customer customer service perspective- to enforce our rules and to make sure that players are aware if they partake in this there is a huge risk in doing so. It's not going to be a slap on the hand. It's not going to be a "we told you once, we told you twice, we told you three, four, five six times okay. We're just taking some gold away", that thing. We have got to ensure that it is feared to do those things because that ashes has active GMS, it has active customer service, it has an active community team. – Steven Sharif

Two-factor authentication

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

Token-based two-factor authentication (2FA) was expected to be in place for Alpha-1.

Addons/mods

Addons, DPS meters, and threat meters will not be supported.

My decision is not to allow DPS meters nor add-ons. I feel we have adequate measures in place to prevent a majority of potential third party trackers. I know this subject has passionate voices on both sides and I respect the various opinions and positions many of you have expressed. – Steven Sharif

• The developers do not want addons/mods to be necessary to experience the game.
• The developers believe that DPS meters (parsers) can cause toxicity and other negative behaviors.

What role DPS meters provide in online communities that I've noticed in the past my experiences: they can be a bit toxic, they can be a bit exclusionary; and that's why we don't want the DPS meters. – Steven Sharif

• Threat meters will also not be present in the game. There will instead be visual in-game cues to indicate threat.

Meters in my opinion are a removal from the game immersion; and what I mean by that isn't necessarily even the fact that having the meter takes you out of the game per-se, but it is- there's a lot of diegetic approach that you can take that doesn't rely on UI elements like a meter to indicate how you should do a thing; and when you're not utilizing those types of meters you can do different types of strategies and encounter design. You can have things that can be more subtle and aren't going to be immediately given away by a meter indicating something; and that's the type of gameplay that we think that I believe we want to emphasize; and for that reason, we're not going to be including threat meters. What we will be including however are animation indicators. We're going to be including ability indicators to show the tank "hey I might be losing aggro here." I'm observing in the world these immersive elements that are not tied to any specific type of UI, but indicate to me that this monster might be moving off to attack somebody else in a very immediate future; and now I should be using the abilities that I'm saving to regain that aggro, or to lock them down with a taunt or something. That to me is a bit more representative of the type of gameplay we want to to bring in our encounter design. – Steven Sharif

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• There will be integrations available for streaming services such as Twitch and a few other services, but it's not something that will be exposed through an API just yet.
• The design of the game API is still under consideration.

Combat logs

There are combat logs in Ashes of Creation.

We will be providing combat data for individual players in their chat window, that players can filter and analyze for themselves. The goal is to mitigate and make the practice less prevalent through the ease that DPS meters provide. Also to place actionable enforcement for players who attempt to circumvent the decision by use of 3rd party programs, for which we will be monitoring. – Steven Sharif

Milestones

December 2015	First team members were hired.
February 2016	Ashes of Creation design documentation and prototyping.
December 10, 2016	Official website was launched and project announced.
January 18, 2017	Official discord was launched.
May 2, 2017	Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign launched with $750,000 funding goal.
June 3, 2017	Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign completed with 19,576 backers raising $3,271,809.
June 2017	Game production began with a team size of 15-20.
June 21, 2017	Summer crowdfunding campaign launched.
July 22, 2017	Summer crowdfunding campaign completed with 2,485 backers.
September 1, 2017	PAX West 2017.
November 4, 2017	Raised $16,500 for Extra Life children's hospitals.
December 15, 2017	Alpha-0 released on schedule.
March 19-23, 2018	Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018.
April 5, 2018	PAX East 2018.
August 15, 2018	Last day for purchases of Alpha-1 through Intrepid pre-order packs.
August 20, 2018	At Gamescom with My.com.
August 27, 2018	100 developers working on Ashes of Creation.
September 1, 2018	PAX West 2018 panel.
October 19, 2018	Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale (previously called Alpha-1 phase 1 battlegrounds).
November 4, 2018	Raised $20,518 for Rady Children's hospital with Extra Life.
April 15, 2019	60 developers working on Ashes of Creation at San Diego offices (following disengagement with Malaysian art team).
November 3, 2019	Raised $20,901 for Rady Children's hospital with Extra Life.
August 21, 2020	Announced a mutual parting of ways with publisher My.games.
October 17, 2020	Almost 3,000,000 registered accounts for Ashes of Creation.
October 17, 2020	~87 developers working on Ashes of Creation.
November 8, 2020	Raised $88,546 for Rady Children's hospital with Extra Life.
February 26, 2021	Official ashesofcreation.com website redesign.
May 5, 2021	Alpha-1 sales resumed with the announcement of the Adventurer pre-order pack.
May 17, 2021	Verbal NDA was lifted from Alpha-1 testing.
July 9, 2021	Alpha-1 no-NDA preview weekend began on schedule.
July 11, 2021	Alpha-1 no-NDA preview weekend completed on schedule.
July 14, 2021	Alpha-1 no-NDA month long test began on schedule.
August 15, 2021	Alpha-1 no-NDA month long test completed on schedule.
November 7, 2021	Raised $34,485 for Rady Children's hospital with Extra Life.
December 23, 2021	Announced that Ashes of Creation is moving to Unreal Engine 5.
January 14, 2022	Over 120 people working on Ashes of Creation.
November 5, 2022	Raised $77,939 for Rady Children's hospital with Extra Life.
August 31, 2023	Over 150 people working on Ashes of Creation.
November 5, 2023	Raised $76,964 for Rady Children's hospital with Extra Life.
December 19, 2023	Over 170 people working full-time on Ashes of Creation.
March 1, 2024	188 employees working on Ashes of Creation.
April 30, 2024	Nearly 200 employees working on Ashes of Creation.
August 16, 2024	Alpha-2 roadmap and release dates announced.

Accomplishments

• Kickstarter's most funded MMORPG.
• Kickstarter's #7 most funded video game.
• Most anticipated MMO – MMORPG.com's Best of 2017 Awards.
• Most anticipated early access hands-on MMORPG – MMOs World.
• Gamescom 2018: Best Independent game.
• Gamescom 2018: Best Online game.
• Best indie MMO of 2020 – massivelyop.com reader's poll.
• Most anticipated MMO of 2021 and beyond – massivelyop.com reader's poll.
• Top 10 Best Upcoming New MMORPGs For 2021 And Beyond – Forbes.
• 2022 Best MMO Studio – MMOGames.

Gameplay videos

• 2017-05-25 Video - Monster coin system
• 2017-05-30 Video - Pre-alpha Mage gameplay
• 2017-07-16 Video - Pre-alpha arenas
• 2017-07-18 Livestream
• 2017-12-15 Livestream
• 2018-01-30 IGN Ashes of Creation hands-on
• 2018-02-09 Livestream
• 2018-04-04 Video - PAX East Pre-Alpha Gameplay
• 2018-04-06 MMORPG-PAX East 2018 Demo and Interview
• 2018-04-09 MASSIVELY OP - Hands-on with the surprisingly solid combat of Ashes of Creation
• 2018-04-20 Dragon Blogger - Gameplay and interview with Jeffrey Bard
• 2018-08-17 Video - Ashes of Creation Apocalypse - First Look at Action Combat
• 2018-09-01 Video - Ashes of Creation Apocalypse Alpha Gameplay
• 2018-09-27 Livestream
• 2018-10-20 Lazy Peon livestream interview with Steven Sharif
• 2018-10-21 Krojak livestream interview with Steven Sharif
• 2018-10-31 Livestream
• 2018-12-06 Livestream
• 2018-12-06 Video - Ashes of Creation Apocalypse
• 2018-12-13 Livestream
• 2019-03-08 Livestream
• 2019-03-08 Video - Ashes of Creation Apocalypse Castle Siege Gameplay
• 2019-08-21 Video - Ashes of Creation MMORPG Teaser
• 2019-09-24 Video - Ashes of Creation Apocalypse early access trailer
• 2019-09-30 Apocalypse Gaming Session Late Night Edition Livestream (Part I)
• 2019-09-30 Apocalypse Gaming Session Late Night Edition Livestream (Part II)
• 2019-10-02 Apocalypse QnA and Gaming Session Late Night Edition Livestream
• 2019-10-12 Apocalypse gaming session with some lite QnA Livestream
• 2020-03-23 Ashes of Creation - Alpha One Early Preview
• 2020-03-27 Development Update + Alpha One Early Preview Livestream
• 2020-04-30 Livestream
• 2020-05-31 Video - Pre-Alpha Gameplay in 4K
• 2020-09-30 Video - 4K Footage of Aquatic Mounts
• 2020-10-30 Livestream
• 2020-12-22 Livestream
• 2020-12-22 Video - 4K Alpha-1 Preview - Level 10 Boss Fight Footage
• 2021-02-26 Livestream
• 2021-02-26 Video - 4K - Alpha One Gameplay Update
• 2021-03-26 Livestream
• 2021-04-30 Livestream
• 2021-04-30 Video - 4K - Alpha One Raid Boss - April Update
• 2021-05-28 Livestream
• 2021-05-28 Video - Early Siege Gameplay in 4K
• 2021-07-14 Guide to Alpha-1
• 2021-07-30 Livestream
• 2021-12-23 Video - Ashes of Creation Unreal Engine 5 Walkthrough
• 2021-12-27 Video - Ashes of Creation Unreal Engine 5 Preview
• 2022-06-30 Livestream
• 2022-06-30 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Basic Melee Weapon Attack Update
• 2022-09-30 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Basic Ranged Weapon Attack Update
• 2022-10-28 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Gathering Updates
• 2022-12-02 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Night and Day and Other Heavenly Things
• 2023-01-27 Video - Alpha Two Tank Preview
• 2023-03-31 Video - Alpha Two Story Arc Systems Preview and the Lore of Carphin
• 2023-04-28 Video - Alpha Two Mage Archetype Preview
• 2023-05-31 Video - Alpha Two Cyclops Combat Preview
• 2023-07-14 Exploring the Boundless Opportunities of Freeholds
• 2023-08-31 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Village Nodes Update
• 2023-09-29 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Event Update
• 2023-10-31 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Caravan Preview
• 2023-11-30 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Artisanship Preview
• 2024-01-31 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Caravan PvP Update
• 2024-02-29 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Commissions Preview
• 2024-04-30 Livestream
• 2024-04-30 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Midnight Magic Preview
• 2024-05-31 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Node Wars Preview
• 2024-08-30 Livestream
• 2024-08-30 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Citadel of The Steel Bloom and Firebrand Preview
• 2024-09-27 Livestream
• 2024-09-27 Video - Ashes of Creation Alpha Two Lionhold Preview

External links

• Ashes of Creation official website.
• Ashes of Creation official Discord.
• Ashes of Creation official forums.
• Ashes of Creation official Twitter.
• Ashes of Creation official Facebook.
• Ashes of Creation official Instagram.
• Ashes of Creation official YouTube channel.
• Ashes of Creation official Twitch channel.
• Ashes of Creation official Steam community.
• Ashes of Creation official subreddit.

See also

• Intrepid Studios
• Release schedule
• User interface
• Design pillars
• Crowdfunding