Talk:2020-07-31 Livestream

Intro 35:42
Margret: Hello everyone welcome to our game development update or July. It has been a crazy month for us how are you two doing?

Jeff: Doing good.

Steven: I'm doing very well. It's beautiful weather here in San Diego, even though we're not allowed to go outside. But , yeah.

Jeff: We can go outside

Margreth: We can go outside, just like, not too around other people.

Jeff: I'm going to the beach!

Steven: Are you going to the beach?

Jeff: No, we went last weekend though. It was nice.

Steven: Wow it's cool.

Margret: Jeff's got some weird thing going on your camera's, like, doing some weird thing, I don't know what's happening man it's not the camera the ghost in the machine.

Jeff: Checking my connections.

Margret: But my heart is racing because we have lots of new people in our community so first and foremost I just want to say: A huge welcome to all of you who are joining us. If this is your first time watching a game development update I'm going to kind of walk through what we'll be covering and some quick updates and then we'll get into it. We roughly do these about an hour but sometimes they go over because we really like talking to you all. And normally we do like a Q&A segment but because we just did an AMA recently, and you could check that out on our youtube channel over at youtube.com/Ashesofcreation, we aren't going to do a Q&A segment. But we will be pulling questions from the channel throughout.

Steven: Oh nice.

Margret: Yeah. So the first things first: Let's introduce ourselves, so people know who we are and what we do on the project. For all the new folks, obviously I'll start with Steven, so go for it Steven.

Steven: My name is Steven Sharif. I'm the creative director, as well as the founder of Intrepid studios.

Margret: Yeah and I'm sure all of you have seen a lot of Steven around lately. He's been chatting with a lot of folks and answering a lot of questions, so thank you Steven. And I've also seen you popping in on the social media that's cute. Sometimes I'm like going to reply to somebody and then I see that Steven has already repplied and I giggle because some of the stuff you say is really funny.

Steven: Sometimes. I apologize for some of my tweets from the official Ashes of Creation twitter account sometimes they can get a little 'memey'. But I have a lot of fun, interacting with people. And I've thoroughly enjoyed the interviews over the past couple of weeks with Summit, with Shroud, with Asmongold, with Tim the Tapman. They were it was a lot of fun to just chat with fellow gamers and MMO players who share, I think, a similar passion for the genre. And it's been great to see their community's reactions, and it's awesome to welcome you guys if this is the first time you're tuning in to our development update. We've been doing monthly development updates, you know, ever since the end of Kickstarter. Every month for the past, you know. Over three years now because we really do believe in the transparent, you know, development process and how beneficial that can be. And I know you guys have heard me talk about this in the past but. How beneficial that can be, engaging the community early on. Sometimes, if you build a game up and you don't show anything of that game until three months out from launch. It's a very difficult to go back and fix things and that can cause a lot of issues so I as a gamer. I'm a firm believer, and now as a developer in that transparent process and we we really enjoy that you guys are now tuning in and helping us get that feedback.

Margret: First, do not apologize for being meme. Because I think that's awesom,e that is our culture, I think it's okay. But I do think, you know, on that front. It is very interesting and different to be showcasing development so we do want to set the expectation that; A lot of these things that you're seeing are in development, so yes, of course animations are going to change. Ofcourse art's going to be updated. Ofcourse systems are going to be more robust. This is the first phases of them so keep that in mind as you're watching things and as you're learning about things and we try our best to explain that but if you see it from a third party it might not always give that same impression.

Steven: Yeah one of the one of the favorite things I have actually about a transparent development and now having three years under the belt in this production of Ashes of Creation. It's always fun to go back to like the first gameplay footage that, you know, when it was just like me Jeff and a handful of other people in the studios. And take a look at, you know, where the game has come from at that time and in three short years where it's at today, you know, keeping that kind of that storyboard timeline in place, really gives you perspective on just how things with iteration become better and better and better, and knowing that, you know, even though you're seeing pre-alpha gameplay like today on the stream or you saw our 4k footage that we released last month. Like, it still gets much better from there that is without polish, without optimization, you're getting an inside look at what it means to build this massive project. And really we are one of the most ambitious MMORPGs, I think, really ever attempted. Not because we're trying to reinvent the wheel, but because we are bringing in a culmination of these systems and designs we've seen in other games as inspiration, on how to make a truly PvX, you know, 'sandpark' experience. And I think that's something really fun to watch.

Margret: And of course Jeff if you wanna introduce yourself.

Jeff: [Interupts]I think I think we should re-. we should republish that first combat video -

Steven: NO! [Laughs]

Margret: NO!

Jeff: - then people can see exactly how far we've come.

Steven: When we launch I'll agree with that but,-

Jeff: Okay

Steven: So that let's keep that underneath-

Jeff: I'm gonna hold you to it

Steven: -because, you know, there's some percentage of an audience that's first-time lookers and they don't understand what we're saying right now on stream, they're not one of the, you know, 12 000 people who are tuned in currently. So they don't have context. And when they see that first video they're gonna be like: Oh-

Jeff: They're gonna think it's amazing!

Steven: -this is trash this is dog, you know, shit. Or whatever so we got to be cognizant of that.

Margret: And of course Jeff if you want to talk a little bit about what you do on our team and all of that jazz because we haven't gotten to you yet.

Jeff: Yeah I am Jeffrey Bard. I am the lead game designer for Ashes of Creation, you know, I've been with the studio for three, five years now, it's been a while, yeah so we like making fun games, and and we're really excited to share that all with you.

Steven: Yay

Overlook 41:47
Margret: Awesome. So quickly I'm just gonna go through what we're gonna be covering today: We're gonna be doing a studio update as per usual. Steven usually handles that. We'll be doing a design update. We also have some gameplay footage for you all, because I know, you always ask. We will be talking about kind of harvesting and gatherable stuff, so if that interests you in crafting and things of that sort. Definitely stay tuned for that. On the environment side, we'll be doing an environment update with a lot of goodies from there. As well as a character update with some information from that front. Now to get through the quick updates just because I want to get through those really quickly I'll try to go fast. I will switch over to another scene quick. Steven: Oh and just to by the way for those of you guys first time tuning in these development updates aren't always really grounded in gameplay footage, you're gonna see some gameplay footage, but really this is kind of about, I guess, showing the process of what it takes to build a game. So you're gonna see a lot of art related stuff, you're gonna see, you know, models of characters and creatures and mounts, and you're going to see, you know, effects and design discussions and, you know, pretty much. Really this is focused on what it means to develop a game, and and less around marketing or, you know, hyping, so to speak, the gameplay footage as, you know, you may have experienced with other games. So just keep that in mind, the context of this of our monthly develop update. Development updates are really focused on the production of the game.

Margret: Yeah, alright. I think you peaked whenever you got excited there.

Steven: Oh did I? Was I loud?

Margret: So the first thing that I wanted to showcase-

Jeff: Don't peak yet!

Margret: -was that we do have new emotes on our discord. So definitely go check those out, we have more coming along the way as we lead up to alpha, so definitely check them out. Jeff really likes them, as he was watching Mike make these. Mike's our graphics guy. 'Thanks Mike'.

Jeff: They're like my favorite thing in the entire world.

Margret: Yeah he walked by and he's like: "What is that? So cute!" But yeah the this is Nick and Fee or Fee and Nick, you know, Fee-Nicks (phoneix) get it, huh?[Laughter] they're amazing. we kind of have like these little characters. We have like whole personalities for them Nick is like the older brother Fee is like the little sister who's always getting into trouble and Nick's always cleaning it up so. We have a lot of fun with it, there's more emotes coming along we're going to try to get twitch emotes and we know everyone keeps asking. Next we have our packs. People have been asking me to let you guys know whenever those are going to be swapping over. These will be swapping over on August 5th, 2020 at 11 a.m. This is 11 a.m pacific, I should say, these are also noted in our news articles as we announce new sets, so you already know the dates whenever they're swapping over way in advance, so just keep that in mind. Because some folks didn't realize that that was the case. We do have.

Steven: And by the way just a quick note on the pack stuff. I know we've been getting a lot of people asking how they can, you know, purchase an alpha 1 access. About two years ago I suspended the sales of 'Alpha 1' packages and that was primarily because we had already reached kind of the peak testing group that we wanted to have for 'Alpha 1' before we allowed additional people to come in. That may change in the future. It depends on how the testing will go, it would not change until after the initial stress testing and getting everything solidified on out end, where we feel comfortable that we can go above that, you know, 10 000 person limit that we restricted those pack sales to. So if that is something you're interested in: Right now it's not available, you can always upgrade any package that you may own, but otherwise you, if you don't want to buy pack it's perfectly fine just sit back. It's going to be not under NDA so you can watch, you know, other people playing on stream. You can get people's kind of idea of of the game and its current status and and understand what, you know, we've implemented from a core feature standpoint as well.

Margret: Yeah and we do have our bonus dev discussion up. This one is a little bit different because basically came from the AMA with Steven. So we decided to put out a multi-boxing conversation, because folks were it was kind of like a heated back and forth conversation so we were like, you know, what let's kind of see what the community sentiment is overall. And then the dev team is going to take that report and kind of discuss it internally and maybe we'll change our mind maybe we'll keep it the way that we currently have standing on it. But you can go check that out over on our forums: forums.Ashesofcreation.com. And we also will have another new dev discussion coming up in August, as per usual, so stay tuned for that as well. We won't take one away, we're just we're just giving you an extra one. Because Jeff has a long list of questions for us to get through so we're definitely trying to get through those.

Jeff: Like a year's worth Margret: Yeah and the last update that I have for you all is. I'm sorry if I'm talking fast I'm nervous there's so many people here.[Laughter] Someone's like: "Girl slow down!". alright. I'm gonna switch over to another scene. we have this lovely statue that is still available. Our creative director's letter came out this month, so if you haven't checked that out definitely go check it out. We did announce that our 'leader of men' MPI testing will be coming up here shortly and probably around mid-August so stay tuned for that. We are currently trying to get everyone's NDAs signed, so if you didn't see an email come in, definitely check your spam and junk mail box, because we have sent those out. We're gonna send out another reminder today for new folks who have upgraded. So if you get that email please check it over the weekend get us your information and our CS-team will start back up on monday sending out those, and getting you flagged so that you have all the information as we publish that to you all.

Steven: Yeah and just to be clear anybody who registers between now and when is it Margaret, September?

Margret: Yes, I was just gonna say that. So this will be for anybody who has registered from april 7 2020 to september 7th 2020 and we'll do, you know, 12 a.m or 11 59 a.m or p.m PDT that time.

Steven: Yeah and there's no purchase behind this. All it is, is a account registration so you can participate in the forums and get involved in discussions. Anybody who registers on the site gets this as a home decor item. It's going to be a pretty cool little item that, you know, signifies the struggles that we as humanity have gone through now with covid, and are continuing to go through. It'll have a little bit of some effects as the portal there. And will be placeable in your home on a table or, you know, a mantle, stuff like that.

Margret: Yeah it's beautiful. I'm so excited. So that is it for our quick updates so let's get right into our studio update if you want to take it away Steven.

Hiring 48:10

Steven: Absolutely so as many of you have probably seen. Sorry my dogs are walking up. As many of you guys have probably

Margret: Show us doggies!

Steven: I can't the little thing the camera's on like this tri-pod thing.[Laughter] Now anybody who's been who's been following, you know, our socials, may have noticed that we have now begun our next round of hiring. We have listed 24 positions that are available at the studio. I was a little bit hesitant early on with this covid crisis to initiate that next round. But honestly, we waited as long as we could it's not, you know, looking good from a: c'oming back to the office standpoint' with the working from home condition but, you know, the team has been has been really amazing in, you know, maintaining productivity. As a matter of fact, being actually more efficient and working from home as we've noticed but, you know, the onboarding process while in a 'work from home state' is obviously difficult. But we had to bite the bullet and begin that next phase of hiring. So I believe we've now secured about 7 of those 24 positions. So one thing that's really helpful, by the way guys, if you like the ideas that we're talking about, if you like the philosophies that we have within the project, you know. If you have favorite developers out there, that you like. I'm all for you, helping us share those posts for our hiring phases, you know, tagging your favorite developers and saying: "Hey have you heard of Ashes?" Yeah I mean, I am unabashed in that sense so, you know, don't worry about doing that.

Jeff: This is a very cool project and and it's something that, you know, I don't think too many developers will get a chance to work on. Where, you know, where we're at right now and kind of the amount of contribution that you can make to the project. For a project that is this big you get to work on a lot of really cool interesting problems, and kind of be on the bleeding edge of MMOs so.

Steven: Yeah don't be don't be afraid to share that. But otherwise, regarding studio update I know previously I had hoped that we would have been into our new studio in August/September time frame. Fnfortunately, the way it looks like covid is going, and especially in our great state of California. It doesn't look like that time frame is going to be possible. So, it looks like, you know, I may need to push back us entering back into the studio, in the new studio until sometime after the new year. Because with the rollout of our initial 'Alpha 1' testing being sometime around the end of fall, the end of this year. It would just be too hectic to come up upon that timeline, and at the same time trying to service a live test client. That would be problematic in my opinion. So that's a little update on the move process, update on the hiring process, from a development standpoint. As you guys know you have seen me likely doing some interviews and whatnot, the desire. Let me just be clear: The desire there is not to drum up hype for the game. I know that that hype can lead to the dark side for many projects, and we don't want to be on that front. What we want to do, however, is be open and transparent, and give people the opportunity to discuss their feelings and their thoughts on our design ideas. To watch our testing periods, to give feedback in that regard, you know. There is still a long road ahead of us, we are a very dedicated passionate and productive team. We have a lot of veteran MMORPG developers from many other favorite franchises that you guys have played and, you know. We just want to keep that open transparent development process going forward and that's really the reason for getting fresh eyes on the project it's always beneficial, you know, to take into account the feedback that, you know, community members who have been with the project for a long time have. But it's also great, fresh and constructive, I think, to receive new fresh feedback from fresh eyes who may not be as close to the project as our existing community. And that doesn't mean we don't love our. I love our existing community a 100%. But it's great to diversify the feedback. I think that's something that's very beneficial as well. So you've seen me doing some of these interviews that really is intended to get fresh eyes on the project get that fresh feedback. But otherwise that's I think the general update for the studio.

Margret: Yeah we've got a lot going on and as Steven said: We are bumping through everything even with working from home obviously we're still doing our game updates from home so you see us in our house. I'm kind of sad Jeff, we don't get to see -

Jeff: Why are you sad?

Margret: because we don't get to see the princess castle behind you anymore.

Jeff: Oh, yeah. It's she's. She hasn't been playing with it too much lately. So I was taking up a lot of space in the living room and it was kind of, you know, had to spread our wings a little bit. But it'll probably come back maybe towards the winter when she gets more interested in it again, we'll see.

Margret: [Laughs] We got to get you like a little princess crown, so you can.

Development tools 53:10

Margret: Okay so moving on over to Jeff, speaking of which let's talk a little bit about the design team, and what you'll have been working on. And we do have a lot of footage, so we have some cool particle effects updates that we're going to showcase. As well as a 17 minute long video so we're going to show that off as well. And then we'll come back and we'll chat so let's. [ Jeff: Yeah so it's been sort, of we hit our big milestone kind of back in in May. And so the time that we spend after that is sort of catching up on on other things, right. So we learned a lot of stuff from that test and so when it comes to kind of figuring out where we want to go and what tools we need next in coming up to these these next milestones that we're we're gonna tackle. So a big thing we need are tools. Tools that allow us to scale towards the sort of massive game that we're trying to build right now so the design team is kind of sitting down defining all those tools kind of figuring out what we need to do to to move forward and, you know, do things like, populate a huge gigantic world how do we do that quickly how do we do that efficiently and how do we do that, interestingly. So so we sit down we write a bunch of definitions for engineering and then they start building tools for us and we're kind of getting towards the end of that process right now.

Steven: Right and really what Jeff's talking about, you know, there's obviously, as you begin to stand up different phases of a project moving into the first alpha, you know, you have these rudimentary tools that help facilitate that process on the design front. But as you begin to work your way through implementation of certain core features or content, you start to better define what those tools will require because you've gone through that first process initially. So as we as we go back and we iterate essentially, you know, talking with engineering about, you know, what additional features this tool requires, you know, how we want this to to interact with the content we're attempting to to implement. That gets further refined, further refined until when we have a full pipeline in place with those tools it really expedites the proces,s and accelerates the ability for the designers to implement things into the world.

Margret: Do you want to give an example of a tool? To kind of help people, who maybe don't understand like the logistics of how that works.

Jeff: Yeah, sure. Like so we populate our world with spawners basically and the spawners talk to the nodes and they kind of know what the state of the world is, right. There's a lot of data on any given spawner but the process of actually placing those spawners in the world and setting that data can take a long time. So we have a huge world and we need to put a lot of monsters in the world and we need to have a lot of different states being covered by what the nodes can be, right. So what we discovered is we need sort of a world manager something that can talk to all of these nodes and we can tell that world manager how to handle those spawners rather than us individually setting up each and every single one. So that's kind of where we're going on the population side something that can help us do things at scale across the entire world. Because if you keep in mind right, a node can have any number of states right it could be level three and an elf node or it could be level six and it could be a human node. And our our world is populated differently based on those states, so if you could imagine we would be populating the world almost like I don't know I don't know what that ends up being math-wise but like 50 different times and so we need something to help us out that way and that's that's the kind of tool that we're talking about, yeah.

Margret: Awesome, thank you. So I have some cool particle effects. I'm gonna be swapping some cameras over so it's going to take a moment before our cameras are all in the right spot, so so bear with us. oops wrong one.

Steven: No such thing.

Jeff: I see there's a lot of people in chat talking about a Frognar race. I guess that'd be kind of like a heavily frog influence to Tulnar species.

Steven: [Laughs]I don't know if that falls into the to the reptilian category. The frog attributes or it more a. Oh are we showing that video?

Blink Skill effect 57:15

Margret: Yeah, we. It accidentally went up, sorry. I probably hit the wrong thing. Because I originally had it in a different order but you wanted to switch it so I forgot to move it on the screen. So the first thing that you're seeing here is actually our blink ability and we're also going to show the blink impact. We've been doing a lot of particle effect changes and I'll let Jeff kind of talk about the design behind that.

Jeff: Yeah, so. I know people who may be familiar with Unreal, know that Unreal moved a little while ago to from Cascade as a particle system solution to Niagra. And Niagra is a really cool, really smart way of building particles. So we've been kind of transitioning that our RFX guy Jim Sanders who is just amazing at what he does has been playing with it and trying to integrate it into our pipelines. And we're pretty much set to go there, so all of our new effects will be authored in Niagra. We're also combining that with Houdini so we're doing some cool stuff there too to get some really neat effects. Steven: And just to, oh sorry go ahead and Jeff.

Jeff: No go for it.

Steven: I was just gonna say just to give people context for this particular skill you're seeing effects for. This is one of the Mages kind of fundamental mobility skills their teleport option. And just so you guys are aware the way kind of we work with skills is you have skill points you can allocate into active skills based off, of your base archetype, right. And as you allocate skill points into those skills you can give additional skill points to unlock, you know, additional features for that skill per se. So the initial active skill of teleport may only teleport you forward, but what you're seeing I think from this perspective it looks like he's teleporting backwards. That would be an additional feature that would be unlocked by allocating more skill points which makes the teleport omni-directional. So as you're essentially looking within a, or excuse me, as you're essentially keystroking in a particular direction and you activate the skill your teleport ability will teleport you, maintaining your direction in that in that area.

Jeff: And yeah, Also if you're wondering about the background here. This is one of our, we call this our zoo level. And it's basically got all of the mobs populated here in sections according to levels. So that we can jump in really easily and kind of tune things.

Margret: Yeah it's kind of like their dev build area. So they can just just do testing and stuff like that. Because people are like: "'Birdperson' what's that?" And of course he's clicking on the ability because he's kind of showing, you like, the what do you call it? that..

Jeff: the tooltip.

Margret: The tooltip. There we go so I'll show the impact of blink as well next. so this is upon.

Jeff: This is like a closer up view of it so that's kind of the thing that's playing off of your mesh when you do that. Obviously this is not a real character, it's just a fake character. And when Jim setting up his ability, usually uses these pawns so that they. It's a really quick iterative process you don't want to necessarily worry about all the functionality and making it work with upon it. First, when you're first setting up those those particle effects so yeah.

Steven: Yeah and the great thing about Unreal Engine, especially with their newest update to Niagra. Is really the front end the graphical fidelity that Unreal Engine offers is is so beautiful. And it's great when you have a very capable and talented artist like Jim, who can really take advantage of those of those systems and and just pump out really great looking art so, kudos Jim.

Gift of the Magi skill effect 1:00:41
Margret: alright and then, switching over to 'Gift of Magi'.

Steven: So yeah. The 'Gift of Magi'

Margret: Do you want to talk about that Jeff, or Steven?

Steven: Absolutely this is a skill, I believe, that the mage archetype has which allows the mage, essentially, to grant a portion of their mana to a friendly character. So you're seeing, you know, here this updated effects for that skill and one of them.

Jeff: Here's sort of the dynamic lighting that is happening on that effect so that's kind of what he's trying to show off here. And then some of the volumetric fog (Yeah) but the way that it lights up kind of the whole area and is not just, you know, baked into it.

Steven: One of the Margret: Oh sorry

Steven: I was just gonna say one of the directions, you know, that I've given Jim, with regards to kind of the style of these of these effects is. I'm a huge fan of volumetric fog elements incorporated into, you know, special effects for the characters and certain skills. And I really love the way that Jim implemented this, you know, this fog appearance, as well as that lighting just to illuminate even further the depth of that, you know, gaseous element around is. I think it's a really cool component of magic and arcane art from an immersion standpoint.

Margret: Yeah he's working on a lot of cool like fog and things of that sort that is really neat. The question that I had that was it from chat, was actually in regards to graphics and like different settings and what those particle effects will look like, if you. I don't know if you all want to talk a little bit about that.

Steven: Yeah so, you know, as we enter into phases of optimization and, you know, as we're developing these types of effects. We're taking into consideration that, you know, players will have a scalability setting that they can tune which is appropriate for their rig or hardware that they're running. That kind of lessens the load on the client in order to render these types of effects or, you know, these numbers of polys on the character or, you know, essentially just having scalability options. So one of those in relation to the effects is, you know, players can can scale that down so it's not as intensive on their on their rig.

Prismatic Beam skill effect 1:02:53

Margret: Alright I'm going to switch over to the 'Prismatic Beam' next.

Steven: Oh yeah,Jeff you want to talk about this skill?

Jeff: Yeah so this is 'Prismatic Beam', this is one of those channeled skills, so it does more damage the longer you hold it down. It kind of roots you into place but it's a really high damage, high risk, high reward kind of ability. The effect here is really neat. Beams are not super easy to do, but the kind of flowy watery, almost, feel of this ability, I think Jim captured really well it feels like a nice awesome powerful laser. I guess even better when you see some of the animations that are behind that [Laughter] you really get a sense of like: "Oh this is a very powerful thing" that's kind of. We always feel and flow is really important to us always. And and this really captures kind of that like: "you are channeling some serious magic here". Yeah.

Margret: Alright or did you something to add Steven?

Steven: You want to talk a little bit maybe about, you know. The difference between the tab targeting skills, that we saw just previously, and how this one works from a line effect standpoint?

Jeff: Yeah so we kind of split the difference between the different kinds of abilities that we have. We want to give people a lot of different opportunities to play the game the way they want to. So we have some abilities that are tab targets, some abilities that are dynamic, and then some abilities that are like purely action based. This is kind of falls into that latter category where, you know. This beam is going to go wherever you are pointing your camera, so you need to be on target, otherwise you could miss, you know, it's not really related to the accuracy of your character's stats, it's more the accuracy of your mouse so. So we want to make sure that you get opportunities to kind of, you know, play that risk/reward game based on how you want to play the game.

Steven: Right. and is this effect an area of effect or does it stop on impact, and deals damage to that initial target and doesn't go past it?

Jeff: Right now I think it does both, as you scale it up. I think the first stage of it stops at whoever you target and then the final stage passes through and hits everything in the cone.

Steven: Nice so that's more about that, you know, injecting additional skill points (Yet) into individual skills to unlock additional features for it. So the initial one would stop on a on a collision impact and then later stage would go through that's cool.

Jeff: Correct yeah.

Margret: And obviously with a lot of testing we may change and alter abilities, so keep that in mind as we're moving forward.

Jeff: For sure. Yeah this is like the first iteration of this ability for the mage so it's going to go through a lot of different changes.

Margret: Yeah. If we're ready to move on to the next one?

Steven: Yeah

Okay the next one is going to be the level up.

Steven: We're definitely going to go over time by the way.[Laughs]

Margret: Yeah, yeah we're definitely going to go over time and we don't even have the Q&A this time we're still going to go over.

Steven: It's a good thing we did an hour and a half AMA.

Margret: Yeah true, true.

Level up effect 1:05:38
Margret: So our next one is our level up effect. Now this is kind of a really important thing with, you know, games because I think they can be really iconic and memorable so do note that this is still in stages so keep that in mind.

Steven: Yeah, oh, here we go. Yeah so I mean, one of the cool abilities that we all love seeing and gives us a major dopamine response is, when our character levels up. Especially when you're higher level, you know, this is the first iteration on the level up effects. One of the things I loved, you know, about when I leveled in Lineage 2 was. It had this like god ray comes down over your character and expands and little leafs like, little golden light leaves fall out of the sky and, you know, it's just it's this cool event. So we wanted to try to hit that a little bit. There's going to be further iterations but this is the first pass and I really like the direction Jim's going.

Jeff: yeah what i really like is: Like the radiance effect, like he really makes. He uses colors in really interesting ways and I love what he's able to bring out in some of these effects. They're not just simple unicolor kind of things there's there's the full spectrum of the rainbow in this effect.

Steven: yeah.

Margret: Alright are we ready?

Jeff: We did talk about using phoenix wings for this so.

Margret: Oooh phoenix wings would be really cool.

Steven: I think we had that in it, super long ago actually, one of the packs events.

Margret: Like little wings on the back of you, (yeah) whenever you. Oh that'd be cool. But yeah we still are obviously going through that. There will be sound effects and things of that sort as well that will be hopefully iconic to you all that is our goal. So when you level up you're like: Yeah, that's awesome".

Video Preface, gathering node types 1:07:25

Margret: So without further ado. I kind of want to preface things before we move into the next thing which is going to be our 17-minute long video. We want to talk a little bit about gathering and harvesting and obviously we'll talk a little bit about it after and I'll grab some questions from chat so definitely toss your questions in we'll also have Ashes of Creation responding to some of the ones that we've already answered before. So I guess Steven if you want to kind of preface this before we.

Steven: Yeah just just to contextualize the video, you know, what. When did we record this? Is it yesterday? (yeah) Yesterday, yeah. God the days are just they're all blurring together. Okay, contextualizing this is basically: We wanted to show off two things. One, the very early stages of gathering and and really the way it works and we're going to go into a little bit more depth afterwards. The gathering is one one branch of of the artisanship tree. There's three primary branches gatherin,g processing and crafting and those are meant to have interdependencies within one another. But essentially what we show today is kind of: there's tool prerequisites when it comes to accessing certain resources in the world as a gatherable. And gatherers will have the abilities to create their tools but those tools will have only a certain number of usage before you need to recreate that tool. And essentially as you become more proficient within the gathering branch of the artisanship tree and your tool making becomes better, you begin to increase the amount of usages that that are available and then those. The usages that are under the tool prerequisite will eventually come to the point where you'll have these master toolsets that'll grant you access to the highest possible gatherables in the world. And one other thing to note about gatherables is: there's both a combination of, I guess, there's three types of of gatherables: There's the ones that a lot of us are used to which is the single single use resource out in the world you gather it, it goes away for a period of time and then it comes back later or randomly spawns elsewhere in the region. The second is going to be these large static veins that exist which will attract lots of people and they'll have a a finite number of gathering that's it possible until that vein is depleted and then it will will go out and respawn somewhere else in the world. And then the last type of gatherable is a mobile group gatherable kind of thing. So these are like herds of animals that might be out there in the world and they may move a little bit so it's like a moving resource so to speak. Maybe exists on a spline and just kind of goes around the world. So you're only going to see, in this video, the very basic type of gathering mechanic which is those, the first type that you can gather. And then additionally we did receive a lot of questions about the size of the world and, you know, one thing that I personally love about an MMO is having this grand, magnificent type of architecture that exists. So we ran you through one of the dungeons but I did it with Margaret and Sarah. By the way this is Margaret Sarah myself doing this little video. I did it at flying above the dungeon so that you can just get an understanding of the scope. I know we had you had seen likely this dungeon in previous 4k video but it was on foot. So I really wanted to to show off, you know, being up in the air and just kind of seeing this grand size dungeon and this is an early dungeon too, it's level 10 dungeon.

Margret: Yeah and we have shown this dungeon before I believe. So you might have seen footage of some of it before but. Are you ready to pass it over to the video?

Steven: Ready!

Jeff: Let's go!

Margret: Alright see y'all in 17 minutes

Video about Gathering and level 10 dungeon 1:11:06
Sarah: Alright now everybody now slide to the left.Slide to the right. Take it back now y'all!

Steven: We're recording by the way

Sarah: What oh.

Steven: [Laughter] Yeah no that was good though I like that so no we're good. hey guys we are we're here live well actually we're not live this is pre-recorded but we're live right now we're live right yeah we're live we're doing it all in one flow I guess is the more so yeah that's true this is this is one flow we're just gonna right now you are where you're on stream with us and we wanted to pre-record this kind of show off some of the gathering and maybe I don't know take a look a little bit around the world those of you guys who are tuning in for the first time this is our pre alpha client this is essentially the 'Alpha 1' client that's getting tested and, you know, the bugs are getting worked out and whatnot so yeah we should maybe go some gather some things did you guys get tools and whatnot yeah I got some tools yeah cool I'm gonna walk you guys can set your walk mode to by pressing period if you want and there we go oh wait oh no I don't think I can do them on the horse that's not sad that's okay we can run around the horse is really awesome though yeah little dance moves I like it but we're gonna let's look for some like some trees are there any trees around here do you guys see any trees that we can chop down there's one down over here so to give you guys an idea out in the world, you know, you're going to have you're going to have raw resource oh here we go you're going to have raw resources that essentially you can if you have the tools available for the test oh yeah here I'll grab let me see there we go the essentially you have the tools for these for these raw resources out in the world you're going to yeah yeah I think you just did it right underneath it yeah I just was safely underneath the log you're going to essentially be able to to harvest different raw resources out in the world based off of the tools that you have available to you and higher quality resources are going to require higher quality tools as well it's also important to note that, you know, many of the raw gatherables out in the world have an opportunity to essentially to grant you rare resources that you can proc based off of the skill level you have with within the gathering tree and, you know, that's always nice to have I think I remember, you know, playing a little bit of star wars galaxies and I really loved how they did their their crafting system I thought it was it was very well done so oh let's kill this dude there's a kitty on me oh no no no protect the door there you go we protected you thank you're welcome oh there's like a brawler over here maybe I should I can like pull him where's my little pole skill then I have a pull skill yeah you should I don't see it no it's a javelin no I always move them around my hot keys so I don't actually know where it is shot I don't like the order that guy got wrecked yeah he's looking a little worse for wearing shouldn't be trying to steal stuff from people no he looks like he's permanently fist pumping and death I'm trying to get this tree there we go there's like a dude standing right in front of it though oh there's two of them oh there's three of them here the tree will kill them do note that like the particle effects are still in the works oh yeah everything are you blinded by my holy light yeah just you guys know that's too divine for us art is art is always going through different iterations and in different passes I personally think it looks great for for pre-alpha but it'll definitely get some love these are these are kind of trash mobs I think we're all level 10 so we're much higher than them oh we're in a party yay we're not in a party I figured we should all be friends yeah that's a good idea yeah that's a good idea so I can see your health and heal you let's see if we can find any more or, you know, what actually there's like a little dungeon here isn't it where's the dungeon oh, you know, if we want to I think we've shown this one before have we shown this one well let's let's go through again and just kind of show off the size of the dungeon let's fly this time because I think okay cool previously we kind of ran through it I don't want to kill this bear though oh it looks too cool no let's not kill it I don't that's it seems like he's just having a nice time oh wait oh no I have a contribution objector to this I'm just gonna stay here there's a lot of herbs and stuff over here so, you know, let's pick them as you go out and gather right there's going to be obviously various tiers of gatherables that are out in the world and, you know, you're going to have the more coMMOn ones that are acting as kind of base base gather bowls based resources that kind of support a tiered structure as you process things upwards and then you're going to have more rare ones and these are all kind of like one-off gatherables that you're kind of seeing here but there are large vein resources essentially which, you know, have multiple multiple applications of the gathering process so like you may have a large mine of a iron, you know, ore and it can attract a lot of people over time to come and deplete it first and then once it gets depleted it'll spawn elsewhere I think this is a like dungeon area as far as the tools go will people be able to like customize their tools and have like cool different looking ones yeah so so tools are going to exist in a similar fashion to the tiered resources that it's applicable towards you can't really customize a particular tool, you know, to look different however based off of the quality of your tool making you're going to be able to have more uses out of these tools now tools will have to be continually replaced as you are using the tools to to gather resources you'll have to replace them obviously alright yeah let's let's we definitely can't kill the content in there but let's fly through maybe this one's not a flying mount really yeah I don't think it is and it's not the one that's in our inventories that's weird I thought it was though are you guys gms yep I think so yeah cause we we yep leveled up stuff that's super weird you guys can't fly maybe you don't have the royal status lift our wings oh I don't think you guys have royal the royal status for some reason that's weird yeah okay well that's fine I'm gonna I'm gonna fly through you guys can try to like run maybe yeah we'll see who can who can live hit c maggie hits e oh yeah z should work there you go okay perfect toast must have made you cnx is up and down so just to kind of like give you guys an idea of the this, you know, this dungeon and give you guys context for the size literally of like the world around you right I mean this is this is a pretty massive sprawling dungeon and this is one of the first like level 10 area dungeons that you can go through the world is intending to be, you know, massive really big and because of that, you know, a lot of the corresponding like points of interest and stuff we want to reflect that size that size in the environments that you're seeing the dungeons that you're fighting and, you know, you see here it's pretty pretty staNDArd multiple rooms that are kind of present different hunting areas that players can can group in and stuff and there is going to be that dynamic where, you know, rooms are going to be contested because some rooms are better than others and that's just how the dungeon works right I think that I know you've answered this before but I'm sure folks who are kind of new are going to ask when it comes to contested how does that work exactly well essentially like let's say, you know, you're in your your guild and, you know, you're in your party and you roll up on like let's say me and Jeff were in our little party and we see you and you and sarah here with your group and you have a room that, you know, has the best, you know, maybe farm rate or whatever you might win in it toasted oh yeah keep it on lockdown we got that well what we would do is we'd roll up and we'd politely say, you know, hey how you doing how long you guys whoops accidentally something pulled up my nvidia thing we would say hey are you guys doing how long you're going to be here for and if you're just like, you know, it's our room you'll never have it then we might have to throw down some fisticuffs and maybe declare like a guild war or flag on you or, you know, something that might contest your ease of gameplay within that room yeah that's pretty much how it would work I would say those are some of my favorite experiences I had like in Lineage and other, you know, PvX games where PvE is very important but that PvE has a gosh darn it I keep trying to fly with my mount and pulling up my nvidia control screen oh well here let me jump down here ah but yeah that's that's that's just kind of the dungeon give you guys little I meant more so like the contestedness of like when you're tagging mobs that's what I meant oh I see got it yeah I get that part though I've had plenty of games where, you know, you find your little place and you like farming for item drops and things of that sort yeah it's really fun for like tagging mobs and stuff, you know, there is a there is a a loot condition that's determined by dps done so if it comes down to like two groups that are trying to, you know, fight in the same area it's really going to be a an act of like seeing who's going to give the most damage output I would say now obviously when you tag a creature tags first right yeah they get a little bonus right they get a little bit of bonus on that front and that's for like the looting rights the experience of a monster will be divided to the groups based off of their percentage of damage done so if you do 50 of the damage regardless of the looting rights which is the tag component regardless of the looting rights the damage done will be equitable in percentage split of experience so if it's ten thousand experience to kill a monster and you do, you know, forty percent of the damage with your group your group will get four thousand experience that's divisible by the group members so yeah just give you guys a little heads up so hope you guys I'm just sitting here looking at the water and admiring how it reflects oh the lighting yeah looks gorgeous right here it's like a razor yeah I do see I see that in the little ground area and a little water spot here that's let me see let me see if I can run up here and get let's go back to that little oh here we go the lava area I love the lava stuff yeah remember oh no I'm gonna run through this run past this dude let's sprint we had a bug where all the lava turned into like water or something like that it looks so weird oh yeah that was definitely crazy I'm just going to run through this dungeon run back just give you guys the ground view of the size, you know, that's here in these dungeons what are some of the favorite dungeons you guys have ever played and when you played in your MMOs there's too many I really like I'll go for it I like like the cars on series and wow just like return to cars on or upper cars on just because there's such weird layouts and funky things where you like drop through portals and sizes change yeah I think my most memorable ones are probably like ashford's call and everquest because it's so dangerous to get into the good farming spots so it takes a while to get in there and like you have to like buff up and all this stuff and then once you get in there like just holding it is, you know, intense yeah I think to me I love I love those dungeon crawls where it's like you don't want to die because getting back there is horrible absolutely I remember it's horrible but it's just an intense, you know, adventure oh these guys are jumping around look at them look at them jumping oh yeah that's probably z yeah my favorite dungeons probably I would say antheris lair in Lineage too the heart area that was I had some long grinding sessions long grinding sessions in that area Lineage was a grinding game and if you had a good group in that heart you were making the best experience possible but, you know, you would always have groups run in and try to pk you or try to take that spot and it was just fun people too kind of gave me a lot of similar vibes to my old eq grinds as well oh yeah another fun one that I used to enjoy in Lineage was the force of pokers but if you were if you were like a hero you could port down into the forza poker area so you didn't have to like go through the like hour long run it took to get there and I definitely enjoyed I was a little bit of a griefer because I would I would go down there and we would always be at war with this one guild and I would oh you're gonna die and I would I would try to attack their their team as one person versus like seven of them so I would just like jump right in I just pulled one oh you leashed it back Steven's deferred I'm a fur oh yeah I don't know about look at how many bears there are here yeah but that's why I kited only one out to us oh there's a lot of bears there let me see if we can run in this here okay oh yeah this is another thing that's cool is like the world bosses oh that's bright the world bosses having them get, you know, epic epic boss rooms I love that too and like playing with the environmental hazards and stuff that's that's possible yeah I like that that reminds me I didn't really think ddo had dungeons where it was like this, you know, epic thing where you had to like crawl through it and hold on to it or anything like that but it did have some really interesting mechanics as far as like traps and stuff like that that I think was really cool and puzzles oh yeah yeah jumping possibilities maggie do you love jumping puzzles, you know, I hate jumping puzzles I'm so we need round two no yeah where's the jumping puzzle oh you got to be dismounted oh there it is it's waiting for us to go through I think but yeah alright we're going to see you back on stream hope you guys enjoyed a little little look inside the game right now I know it's been a while since we saw some footage about a month but a little talk on gathering we'll talk a little bit more on stream and we'll see you guys soon yeah thanks bye guys alright now everybody now slap alright hopefully you all enjoyed the video we'll have it kind of playing in the background here while we chat a bit I grabbed a bunch of questions from chat there's one person in particular you're spamming I'm still gonna ask your question but no need to spam I was I was snagging all the questions for y'all the first thing I do want to preface is for those of you who are new because I saw some people commenting about flying flying is not going to be like that we're not all just going to be able to fly I don't know if you guys want to talk a little bit more about that obviously we've answered this many many times yeah but we've got tons of new people yeah we got this is true so just to be clear flying is is very very very restricted it's a very powerful obviously achievement but it's restricted to the leaders of guilds that own the one of the five castles in the world as well as the mayors of metropolis stage nodes which there can only be five at a time and then there are rare drops that occur from legeNDAry world bosses that are essentially eggs that players there's a lifetime on that egg and then a lifetime on the mount sorry that's terrible and then there's there's there's essentially you can raise that up to increase the lifetime per se but it's limited so there really will only ever be maybe at a time, you know, between 10 to 15 players that are going to have access to flying mounts but they will be significant amounts they'll have abilities that are very strong all mounts will have certain types of abilities and the royal mounts will have the most effective abilities especially when it comes to PvP or aoe type effects and you won't be able to run through like we did we obviously have like gm hacks and stuff like that but you won't you shouldn't be able to like just run through the entire dungeon and skip everything necessarily yeah that wasn't a legit better experience it was more just showing you guys but you went out in the dungeon yeah also Steven you just left me there when I like pulled just that one mob for you perfectly I peeled perfectly oh yeah it wasn't about the lava bear like no they hit hard put some gm armor on you could tell that Steven's used to being the mage because I'm used to being the tank so I'm used to like pulling like little mobs like that all the time oh yeah so I do have a lot of questions I don't know if you want to go into those first if you'd rather just kind of like talk about crafting because I do want to talk about harvesting and gather bowls and crafting a little bit I know you talked about it as a like contextual but maybe going into more depth I don't know which one you want your first questions or we can do some questions just just keep in mind that obviously as we test some of these systems are going to get iterated on and then additionally I know we're going to release a blog later on that goes into some significant detail so it might be it might be smart to save some of the really detail-oriented questions for the for the blog when that comes out but yeah we can do some questions alright let me grab these questions and then we can talk about other stuff that's not covered here so nicodala picka do live liver oliver I don't know I'm probably gonna say all your names wrong so sorry say I don't harvest or gather for a couple of levels would I then fall back or fall behind in skill and not be able just stop I can't read because your name keeps covering stuff sorry not being able to gather certain resources in a higher level area yeah so the advancement and progression that exists within the artisanship path does not correlate to that of your adventuring class so you could you could not you could choose not to touch gathering at all until you max your adventure and class level out and then you can go back and that's going to be completely, you know, removed from those two things you can go back and you can start gathering, you know, the lower end tier type gatherables and start building up that profession excuse me start building up that branch of the artisanship tree and as you build it up you begin to get access to certain professions that you can then start essentially utilizing to get additional experience there which unlocks more capabilities yeah also keep in mind that the way that we're designing these these zones is it's not a progressive like this is a level 10 zone this is the level 20 zone this is level 30 zone that's not how the game is designed every level will represent and have some content for just about any level person and that goes with resources too right resources are going to be available in places where they make sense not necessarily based on we're going to put all the iron in the level 10 zone and all the mithril in the level 20 zone that's not how it's going to be functioning it'll be more more regional realistic regionalized and a little bit more it'll be less gamey and more natural I guess more organic right and the idea there is to essentially provide kind of system generated stresses based off of those placements so that regions and localities have to essentially utilize the trade systems and the caravan systems to move goods around so that players have access to their local warehouses for the materials and or gatherables in order to either process them or use them in crafting stations that come online as nodes advance so there's a significant, you know, importance on the location of these goods and how they relate to the location of the crafting centers as well yeah the economy is super important to us we want sort of a living economy which means that there is a sense of supply and demand right some regions will be will have a lot of a certain type of resources and they won't have other types of resource and it will be up to players to sort of take advantage of those those different supply and demand curves and try to maximize the amount of money they can make from it yeah we could probably take one more question margaret just because I know we have a lot of art stuff to show as well and we're already at the hour mark oh my gosh okay true true I did I did pull like 20 questions so that's probably why he could they can see how many questions okay so I'll just ask this one because it actually pertains to what you're just talking about which was selling stuff spectron 7x asked about player sales and auctions will there be any way for players to search for items before they travel to a specific node or will players be restricted to shouting advertisements in nodetowns my perspective comes from star wars galaxies and eve online both games had mechanisms for discovering that an item is sold at a location prior to traveling there so you don't waste your time kind of sure so real quick on that front there's a lot of components to that question it touches a lot of different things but on the auction house front economic nodes will have access to auction house that are local to those to those nodes and as a node progresses and begins to vassal other nodes if the parent node is economic it will have the ability to connect with those vassal nodes that are under its zone of influence and it will be able to to share the auction house in that in that regard especially at the metropolis stage additionally from a player stall or shop standpoint if you're in an economic node there will be certificates that you can purchase from the economic node main main building that will provide the license essentially the business license to us to sit down and put up a player owned shop wherever you're at in the world but you have to have the license that you purchase from the economic nodes and then additionally each node has the availability to either build a market or economic nodes or by default have player owned stalls or rented stalls sorry these stalls you can put in either services for for recipes that you have access to that players can come and interface with and utilize and you can charge a fee for it or you can list items for sale within the stall now all of those stalls and and the auction house's listings are capable of being observed so that, you know, where to go to get certain things on a community board essentially where you can access the town center's community board and it will show you the location and items that you can search through and then you'll have to travel to that location if you don't have access to either an integrated auction house hub or the stahls not present in that location yeah we actually have an article about economic notes a lot of stuff that Steven talked about is in there and even goes into more detail so if you want to go check that out it's on our news news page Ashes of Creation dot com slash news you can find it through the node series which is called economic known so you should be able to find it pretty easily I know we still have more in that series that are coming along but design is still finalizing the military one and the divine one so we haven't put those out yet because we want to make sure that they're pretty much in a like more finalist shape before we like share that information with you all so with that we know we have a lot of questions I just want to preface that normally we do do we do do a Q&A segment on our live stream obviously this time we're not because we did an AMA for a really long time if you want to check that out it's on our youtube youtube.com Ashes of Creation but we will be doing another Q&A for our next one so stay tuned for that and we'll let you guys know in advance we usually announce that like a week in advance before our live stream so you have time to plug in your question and then toast who's amazing our lovely community manager she'll put together the ones that have have already been answered and answer those for you and the ones that haven't we'll put into our live stream for that so stay tuned for that so without further ado we're going to move on to environment art the first thing we have here is the wonderful particle effects this is another wonderful thing from Jim we have shown some of the waterfalls in the past but I'll let Steven kind of talk a little bit about this they're so pretty yeah I think just part of the process that goes into iteration over the art assets that enter the game, you know, we had some old waterfalls that didn't necessarily live up to snuff and how the world was progressing so Jim took a pass on those and as you can see, you know, not only do the effects look great but the updated water shader also, you know, is starting to look really good these will continue to go through iterations as we get closer to launch but as you can see already in this pre-alpha state, you know, I think this this looks great they look very natural they look very immersive in the world and it's also great because they're way more performant than the old ones were like way more and they look about as much better which is great it's always great when you when you gain on the performance side and on the visual side you're like oh wait that's not supposed to be the case but yeah it looks great yeah it looks wonderful people are saying this is their yoga spot we got some yogis out there I like it and our next one is going to be the seaside environment assets that mia made I love the I love when I when I do the stream because I never have time to review the assets prior and so this is all just like oh okay yes you probably see it when you're running around in the world but like you don't realize like yeah yeah mia is a is a wonderful artist she is so talented and and experienced and I mean you can just see the detail and, you know, the tender love and care that goes into creating these these environment assets, you know, really to make the world look like a beautiful place I mean it's immersion such an important component in our gameplay experience and part of that immersive quality comes down to to to the sheer the sheer talent that goes into our amazing artists creating this world so yeah these look I love these yeah they're great and then the next set of assets we have here are the junior node buildings that ricky made yeah ricky ho one of our one of our concept artists as he begins to kind of diversify the selection of architecture for the duner race and all the in and the other races working with our talented concept team, you know, they provide these production ready concept pieces in order for the production artists the 3d modelers on the environment side to really stick to this architectural design in creating these assets so part of 'Alpha 1' excuse me part of 'Alpha 1' and moving forward into the different testing phases because the nodes adopt the predominant culture that gave the node experience to advance it renders the appropriate culture to represent the the race that that helped establish that node so we start flushing out additional buildings, you know, these are constructed in a modular fashion so that they can be mixed and matched to some degree to help not only speed up the production time but also provide devin one of our environment artists who created a great building tool that you may see a dev diary on our youtube page of where essentially you can go through these modular sets and start just pumping out a lot of different buildings and the concepts here help to guide those those necessities yeah I'm just going to go through them quick yeah that's a good idea yeah but as you can see these are these are mostly what it looks like village stage building variants that exist within the near the duneur culture the duneer being a more traditional type of a dwarven race that you might expect from medieval fantasy games and, you know, it's always interesting that these mostly usually dwarves are portrayed inside of a mountain but here you're going to see literal settlements that are out in the grasslands or out in the tundra or wherever there might be in whatever biome and that's going to I think present a really cool really cool and unique presentation for a more traditional type mountain dwelling race I almost timed it perfectly with your mountain with your grassland and your tundra go for it Jeff oh I was just going to say the dwarves haven't had enough time to excavate the mountains yet when they arrived so right exactly love it they haven't cleared out the dark corrupt denizens that may exist in the object now we get to move on to our character art team who submitted a lot of great stuff so we're going to switch on over to that first and foremost we have some swimming I know a lot of folks have asked about swimming so I'll let Steven talk over this yeah so I mean as you guys know there is in there's a lot of water content that's planned you didn't see there in the transition from the above camera shader to the below camera shader any type of screen effect that will be applied later like, you know, water kind of drying up or something but as you can see, you know, this is some some fuNDAmental swimming you will be able to utilize your abilities while in the water there is going to be naval contents that will require, you know, large groups of of people participating in water combat as well as a ship to ship type combat so we're now just starting to flesh out essentially those the buoyancy and physics of the of the ocean as well as giving the character animation blueprint the ability to transition from a land state to a water state that utilizes these animations which our animation team has has taken a first pass on I think they're doing good it's good yeah and like we said this is early past so bear with us, you know, these aren't this isn't vinyl or anything like that and we will have some other adjustments to it as well but if you have suggestions and stuff like that you're always welcome to head on over to our forums we love reading all that toast is amazing and puts together reports every month for the dev team so that is the best place if you have feedback or suggestions the best place to go is honestly our forums because we put together reports for those it's easier for us to grab data if you're pm'ing people it's really hard for us to grab the pms from all of Steven right like we're not going to make reports on that that's not happening so but if you put on the forums we are able to grab, you know, we're able to grab that data and easily send it over to the design I'm just prefacing Steven yeah no no it's good because over the past two weeks since I did a, you know, those three interviews I think I've had like 9 000 linkedin views and probably about a thousand linkedin messages and probably like 3 000 discord dms and I got like I try my best to read the dms as much as I can I definitely read the forums and the content creation that happens and the reddit that's a little bit easier to get to for me right right now my phone actually crAshes if I try to access my dms on discord so I can't do that but I can do it from the desktop but we do put together reports for Steven and the design team and whatnot so definitely that's the best way is the forums if you have questions we have a questions channel in our discord that's a fantastic place to go beyond that toast and I try our best to get through all the messages and violet as well like we try our best to go through all of those things and all of our social media but the best way to provide feedback is over on the forums yeah and of course if you have a cs problem the best place is to put in a ticket so without that we're gonna go on to the next one you all have really really loved our lovely goblin friend and now we have one of the variants completed so you can see it with textures look how awesome he is yeah this is this is one of the npc monsters that represents one of the tribes of the goblin race in the world as a adversary he is he is definitely on the green side [Music] people have been asking for him at their like goblin playable race I'm like not not currently planned doesn't I'm never going to say never but not well we already have nine technically through the monster coin system there are potentially events that will occur where you may have multiple of these npcs grouping up to kind of disabled services at a node and will require the response of the citizens and if you have a monster coin available you could play as a goblin for a short period of time or some other type of monster and the more you play and become successful during those events in helping to kind of disable the nodes that exist not destroy them you will be able to get unique cosmetics as a participation achievement in in those monster coin systems so that's something that's interesting you're not wrong yeah I was like actually I didn't think about the monster coin system yeah like maybe you can get his loin cloth and then you just wear the loincloth on your character and it's a goblin loincloth, you know, that'd be great so our next one here is actually robes speaking of clothing we're going to show the kayla robes here we'll start with the starter one and then like a level up of that alright I think I saw the gray scale on this just the grayscale version oh okay got it yeah yeah that's all this is we'll show textures probably next month or something so this is one of one of the very early kind of is this an npc or is this character our armor I think this might be pc yeah so this yeah I was gonna say I don't see the cuts I was like that's interesting yeah this would be an, you know, as we construct different armor sets for npcs to mix and match with you're going to see more of this more of these npc clothing and armor that comes online this one looks like a character this one looks like character I can see the pieces on the arm and the coat and stuff yes level up of it so maybe they're both players yeah I guess they are one yeah yeah level one okay so this is progressive so essentially, you know, we're showing kind of how these character armors are constructed they gradually increase in silhouette size not because your armor is going to progress per se in the game but on a production side in the game actually in the in the development of the game, you know, we use base pieces to help level up these these these armors and grow the silhouette so that they become appropriate pieces that can be utilized in further in higher tier armor sets that the players can achieve and then they get diversified through the materials and the textures and the colors and thematic components that can be applied as attachments these essentially get get, you know, diversified [Music] alright and then our next one here is the spellbreakers gauntlet oh this one's nice so this is a cosmetic now this is the final model this is the finished model this is not this is the concept art this is not concept so this this gauntlet here was a cosmetic when was this cosmetic was it a long time ago I could look but I'd have to oh actually I can look right now I don't have to be on vpn for it well yeah long time ago basically your armor exists in a I believe it's an eight p eight p set that you can individually apply cosmetic appearances towards so you would have a a glove a glove armor piece that you would then apply this this what's it called the gauntlet of spellbreaker's gauntlet spellbreaker's gauntlet so you can apply this cosmetic appearance to the gauntlet now this in the game this this portrays a little 3d effects above the gauntlet that will be rotating and it might actually glow and brighten as you cast an ability or an ability effect occurs right it might call the glow to to to animate and move but this is the in-game model of that spellbreaker's gauntlet my cat has interrupted the chat's probably it was pretty great when we could just see the tail it would be the July 2018 to August 2018. thank you violet lights for sending that my way you were looking down where's the time gone I feel like my life is flying by I know it's crazy it's just game design one large game design I don't remember living before starting Intrepid my headspace has been completely vacated and now only exists in Ashes so the next ones we have are all of the creature stuff so this is a lot of the creature animation and creature particle effects so the first one is going to be actually the troll and it's specifically you're looking at the particle effects on the attack so as you're looking at this don't look at the other things look at specifically the particle effects on the attack okay yeah so this is just some some pretty simple effects on the on the attack animations that you're seeing which, you know, give it a little bit more a little bit more oomph as you see different creatures attacks occur yeah before we were using kind of generically generic sort of particle events for impacts and stuff and this is sort of integrating some of those like to the actual animation of the creatures that are using it so it's it's a little bit more couture it gives kind of it reduces the amount of sort of genericness to the npcs and gives them character so yeah I like that you use the word couture it's one of those words I'm never sure if I'm going to use it right no it's that was a good that was a good word say I'm putting alright next we have our war beast animation we showed a little bit of the warbies before and people lost their minds so enjoy this now and this is like the war beast is agency creation she's amazing hi ginseng someday I'll get you on the stream yay I think it's so huge it's massive yeah yeah it's too bad we don't have a scale next to it but this dude's pretty big like elephant size was it right or maybe a little bit smaller yeah I think he's a little bit smaller than elephant but but there's a variant of him that's gargantuan and carries siege this carries one of the siege weapons the first one that gypsy made Steven was like that is huge yeah look how pretty he is oh look he has a little scene oh yeah they got very excited about showcasing him thank you tristan can you just imagine being in the game and you just hear this like thundering movement over like a hill and you just turn that thing comes at you this thing breaks the horizon and it's just like this dude is charging you and you're just like huh what do you do here I run right that happened to us in a pathfinder game one time kevin was dming and there was a herd of I believe it was bison and we were like level two and one of our people had been trampled so we tried to like help him and then they trampled us and killed the entire party I don't think it was bison I think it was something else yeah tpk by bison it was a big creature though at least the one that I was part of we had a similar situation like that and mcp was also the one damning he loves killing people with herds yeah the next one is going to be our ram so you saw this last week you saw the ram it looks so good yeah we're definitely refining their their fur and hair cards it's like that scraggly goat hair, you know, yeah yeah this looks great I think I think this was carson that did this little dude excuse me sorry about that the not the animations of them but the no no no no sorry he did the model yeah I'm not sure who did these animations that might be myers I believe there it is oh but there he is with his caravan yeah so this is a this is a duneer influenced caravan you can see by the bulkiness and the armor plating on the on the spokes and the wheels and this is in game, you know, the different types of caravans that you can own essentially as you commission them will take the appearance of the cosmetic you have applied and then our next one is going to be our lovely spider first this is the turntable with the spider so you can see the entire model of it so this is an enemy npc that's going to be, you know, obviously arachnids are a favorite a fan favorite when it comes to fantasy games, you know, and this is one of the initial spider creatures that are used there's a several variants ginsee modeled these and, you know, they're going to see if you're making the translucent one that was like I was going to make a translucent one she's like I'll try yeah so these are just some examples of the different spider spiderlings and they'll vary in size as well, you know, you have some that are very large up to the head height of a character and some that are smaller, you know, maybe to the kneecaps, you know, shanky and the knees that little spider will do probably but yeah these are these look good I like these yeah they're awesome I like their little hair pieces and obviously well different types of spiders too like not just they won't all be this like hairy spider type although all the people who are afraid of spiders are probably horrified right now hey it's good to face your fears MMO's help in that regard [Laughter] makes you stronger yeah all those little mandible wiggles well he's hungry he hasn't probably eaten in a while oh that's so creepy nope nope I'm running oh my god look at his mouth it has teeth why does it have teeth [Laughter] I thought it's just supposed to have mandibles it has teeth imagine it's spitting out like acid and stuff too oh no [Music] could you imagine if you had a small mesh where you couldn't see the spider it was like one of those funnel spiders on the beach and as you're walking past just like it erupts out of the ground and attacks having those randomly placed throughout the world not so much like in a hunting ground where, you know, but like just random spawners of funnel spiders that pop out of the ground and you walk over it and you don't even know that there's a spider underneath you because it's like it's like a flat on the ground oh my gosh on it is totally off so oh yeah yes and you just hear the like the clapping of the mandibles and the teeth that'd be great it'd be cool if we could integrate that with like future, you know, computer seats that have like a tactile response and win that event yeah when that event occurs the seat touches you, you know, what I mean fantastic oh yeah it would definitely be crazy losing players to heart attacks yeah we need to add that to our scope creep by the way creation of tactile seats that integrate with calls in game first is that gonna go with our vr experience just kidding I'm just kidding oh no and and I think you made a good point about like feature creep and stuff because I have seen a lot of comments regarding that and we're obviously going to wrap up our show today but we are always going to be conscious of our production line our producers are amazing and making sure that we can stick to our schedule obviously we're kind of a little bit of a head schedule in some aspects because everyone's working from home and really focused yeah we have a lot of stuff that we want to put into the game doesn't mean everything's gonna make it at every milestone doesn't mean everything's gonna make it at launch so just keep that in mind but we'll set the expectations with the content that we put out on our news site we'll always let you guys know what is gonna be coming up stay tuned for that we have a lot of articles for 'Alpha 1' coming out that will talk about each of the classes because I know classes in combat are one of the major things you all want to hear about as Jeff and his design team finalize each of the classes that are going to be in alpha I believe there's going to be six of them correct for alpha there's gonna be five prof I believe okay five yes yeah so we'll be releasing an article about each of those as well as some video content so you'll know which abilities are going to be there what what like what stage it will be and also like the next milestone after that after 'Alpha 1' so kind of what kind of feedback we're looking for for each of those things and then we'll also have stuff for systems and the races and things of that sort so stay tuned we've got a lot of stuff to share with you all so without further ado I will wrap up the show unless you guys have anything else you want to add yeah absolutely just wanted to reiterate I know that right now because of the exposure over the last couple weeks a lot of new eyes are on the project and and again I want to thank everybody for, you know, their support in in lending to this discussion about what an m what makes MMORPGs great we we we cannot thank you guys enough for, you know, coming and joining on the discord subscribing to social media on twitter on on youtube on facebook, you know, you guys at 10k insta so I can have the swipe up I need the swipe up mechanic so with that being said however I do want to make sure we we we temper that hype by letting, you know, this is a process our goal is to create a quality product that has a good launch and that means making sure that we take our time to ensure the quality of that product that it makes you guys proud it makes us proud so there is still a long road obviously ahead but, you know, the great thing about a transparent development is you get to watch us all along that way and I know it's it's difficult to to see this the, you know, the game and and hear the philosophies and the ideas and and just not be overcome with complete grief that you can't play right now but I've always said that, you know, patience is bitter but it's fruit is sweet so having that patience and and keeping with us along this development period we all appreciate that at the studios it is a it is a significant motivator for our developers to to just see the sheer love coming from our community so we appreciate that so much and and and we love you guys from the studios thank you so much and to the people who are like our og folks who have been super helpful I also want to give a shout out to you have been answering a lot of questions being really kind to the new folks welcoming them in and we greatly appreciate that like the words cannot describe how because there's been a lot of people that even toast and I and violet are not able to necessarily, you know, answer so thank you so much yeah MMOs live and die by their community and we've got one of the best ones in the industry absolutely yep so without that with with that we'll wrap things up reminders I'll just go through them really quick we do have new emotes on the discord definitely go check them out they're so adorable we are trying to get them on twitch so stay tuned for that we'll we'll do our best to link up with them and get that going we do have a bonus dev discussion this month which is multi-boxing so definitely go answer that that's going to be wrapping up July 6th because toast has to put together a report for the dev team so that they can go talk and discuss it it's going to be heated I'm sure and then we also have another one coming up for August we won't skimp yet on any dev discussions as Jeff and his team have a lot of questions that they would like to hear the community's perspective on beyond that our monthly cosmetic swap over will be at 11 a.m August 5th 2020 so stay tuned for that we will be showcasing the new set soon so stay tuned for that and the last but not least we have our test coming up if you are leader of men or phoenix initiative definitely check your email we'll be sending out another update today for folks who did not sign yet or if you're still in the ticket system it might catch you as well we definitely need people to sign it so definitely check your inbox it might be in your spammer junk but definitely go check that and reply so that we can get you all flagged up and get you ready for testing because we want to start doing our next test here in August and we need that done first without with that we lastly don't forget that our statue all you have to do is register on our site you don't have to do anything else no payment or anything just register on our account register an account anybody from april 7th 2020 to september 7th 2020 will get access to that I think I can put that up on the screen again including all previous registrations yeah including all previous registrations yeah that's true I guess I didn't need a start date for it I don't know why I was thinking that I'm just so used to having a start and end date for things my mind and that's it so thank you Jeff thank you Steven for taking time out of your day I know you both are very extremely busy so we really super duper appreciate it thank you to all of you who tuned in we appreciate it thank you to the entire Intrepid studios everyone has done an amazing job of, you know, kind of showcasing lright y'all in 17 minutes alright now everybody now slide to the left to the right oh we're out take it back now y'all we're recording by the way what oh [Laughter] yeah no that was good though I like that so no we're good hey guys we are we're here live well actually we're not live this is pre-recorded but we're live right now we're live right yeah we're live we're doing it all in one flow I guess is the more so yeah that's true this is this is one flow we're just gonna right now you are where you're on stream with us and we wanted to pre-record this kind of show off some of the gathering and maybe I don't know take a look a little bit around the world those of you guys who are tuning in for the first time this is our pre alpha client this is essentially the 'Alpha 1' client that's getting tested and, you know, the bugs are getting worked out and whatnot so yeah we should maybe go some gather some things did you guys get tools and whatnot yeah I got some tools yeah cool I'm gonna walk you guys can set your walk mode to by pressing period if you want and there we go oh wait oh no I don't think I can do them on the horse that's not sad that's okay we can run around the horse is really awesome though yeah little dance moves I like it but we're gonna let's look for some like some trees are there any trees around here do you guys see any trees that we can chop down there's one down over here so to give you guys an idea out in the world, you know, you're going to have you're going to have raw resource oh here we go you're going to have raw resources that essentially you can if you have the tools available for the test oh yeah here I'll grab let me see there we go the essentially you have the tools for these for these raw resources out in the world you're going to yeah yeah I think you just did it right underneath it yeah I just was safely underneath the log you're going to essentially be able to to harvest different raw resources out in the world based off of the tools that you have available to you and higher quality resources are going to require higher quality tools as well it's also important to note that, you know, many of the raw gatherables out in the world have an opportunity to essentially to grant you rare resources that you can proc based off of the skill level you have with within the gathering tree and, you know, that's always nice to have I think I remember, you know, playing a little bit of star wars galaxies and I really loved how they did their their crafting system I thought it was it was very well done so oh let's kill this dude there's a kitty on me oh no no no protect the door there you go we protected you thank you're welcome oh there's like a brawler over here maybe I should I can like pull him where's my little pole skill then I have a pull skill yeah you should I don't see it no it's a javelin no I always move them around my hot keys so I don't actually know where it is shot I don't like the order that guy got wrecked yeah he's looking a little worse for wearing shouldn't be trying to steal stuff from people no he looks like he's permanently fist pumping and death I'm trying to get this tree there we go there's like a dude standing right in front of it though oh there's two of them oh there's three of them here the tree will kill them do note that like the particle effects are still in the works oh yeah everything are you blinded by my holy light yeah just you guys know that's too divine for us art is art is always going through different iterations and in different passes I personally think it looks great for for pre-alpha but it'll definitely get some love these are these are kind of trash mobs I think we're all level 10 so we're much higher than them oh we're in a party yay we're not in a party I figured we should all be friends yeah that's a good idea yeah that's a good idea so I can see your health and heal you let's see if we can find any more or, you know, what actually there's like a little dungeon here isn't it where's the dungeon oh, you know, if we want to I think we've shown this one before have we shown this one well let's let's go through again and just kind of show off the size of the dungeon let's fly this time because I think okay cool previously we kind of ran through it I don't want to kill this bear though oh it looks too cool no let's not kill it I don't that's it seems like he's just having a nice time oh wait oh no I have a contribution objector to this I'm just gonna stay here there's a lot of herbs and stuff over here so, you know, let's pick them as you go out and gather right there's going to be obviously various tiers of gatherables that are out in the world and, you know, you're going to have the more coMMOn ones that are acting as kind of base base gather bowls based resources that kind of support a tiered structure as you process things upwards and then you're going to have more rare ones and these are all kind of like one-off gatherables that you're kind of seeing here but there are large vein resources essentially which, you know, have multiple multiple applications of the gathering process so like you may have a large mine of a iron, you know, ore and it can attract a lot of people over time to come and deplete it first and then once it gets depleted it'll spawn elsewhere I think this is a like dungeon area as far as the tools go will people be able to like customize their tools and have like cool different looking ones yeah so so tools are going to exist in a similar fashion to the tiered resources that it's applicable towards you can't really customize a particular tool, you know, to look different however based off of the quality of your tool making you're going to be able to have more uses out of these tools now tools will have to be continually replaced as you are using the tools to to gather resources you'll have to replace them obviously alright yeah let's let's we definitely can't kill the content in there but let's fly through maybe this one's not a flying mount really yeah I don't think it is and it's not the one that's in our inventories that's weird I thought it was though are you guys gms yep I think so yeah cause we we yep leveled up stuff that's super weird you guys can't fly maybe you don't have the royal status lift our wings oh I don't think you guys have royal the royal status for some reason that's weird yeah okay well that's fine I'm gonna I'm gonna fly through you guys can try to like run maybe yeah we'll see who can who can live hit c maggie hits e oh yeah z should work there you go okay perfect toast must have made you cnx is up and down so just to kind of like give you guys an idea of the this, you know, this dungeon and give you guys context for the size literally of like the world around you right I mean this is this is a pretty massive sprawling dungeon and this is one of the first like level 10 area dungeons that you can go through the world is intending to be, you know, massive really big and because of that, you know, a lot of the corresponding like points of interest and stuff we want to reflect that size that size in the environments that you're seeing the dungeons that you're fighting and, you know, you see here it's pretty pretty staNDArd multiple rooms that are kind of present different hunting areas that players can can group in and stuff and there is going to be that dynamic where, you know, rooms are going to be contested because some rooms are better than others and that's just how the dungeon works right I think that I know you've answered this before but I'm sure folks who are kind of new are going to ask when it comes to contested how does that work exactly well essentially like let's say, you know, you're in your your guild and, you know, you're in your party and you roll up on like let's say me and Jeff were in our little party and we see you and you and sarah here with your group and you have a room that, you know, has the best, you know, maybe farm rate or whatever you might win in it toasted oh yeah keep it on lockdown we got that well what we would do is we'd roll up and we'd politely say, you know, hey how you doing how long you guys whoops accidentally something pulled up my nvidia thing we would say hey are you guys doing how long you're going to be here for and if you're just like, you know, it's our room you'll never have it then we might have to throw down some fisticuffs and maybe declare like a guild war or flag on you or, you know, something that might contest your ease of gameplay within that room yeah that's pretty much how it would work I would say those are some of my favorite experiences I had like in Lineage and other, you know, PvX games where PvE is very important but that PvE has a gosh darn it I keep trying to fly with my mount and pulling up my nvidia control screen oh well here let me jump down here ah but yeah that's that's that's just kind of the dungeon give you guys little I meant more so like the contestedness of like when you're tagging mobs that's what I meant oh I see got it yeah I get that part though I've had plenty of games where, you know, you find your little place and you like farming for item drops and things of that sort yeah it's really fun for like tagging mobs and stuff, you know, there is a there is a a loot condition that's determined by dps done so if it comes down to like two groups that are trying to, you know, fight in the same area it's really going to be a an act of like seeing who's going to give the most damage output I would say now obviously when you tag a creature tags first right yeah they get a little bonus right they get a little bit of bonus on that front and that's for like the looting rights the experience of a monster will be divided to the groups based off of their percentage of damage done so if you do 50 of the damage regardless of the looting rights which is the tag component regardless of the looting rights the damage done will be equitable in percentage split of experience so if it's ten thousand experience to kill a monster and you do, you know, forty percent of the damage with your group your group will get four thousand experience that's divisible by the group members so yeah just give you guys a little heads up so hope you guys I'm just sitting here looking at the water and admiring how it reflects oh the lighting yeah looks gorgeous right here it's like a razor yeah I do see I see that in the little ground area and a little water spot here that's let me see let me see if I can run up here and get let's go back to that little oh here we go the lava area I love the lava stuff yeah remember oh no I'm gonna run through this run past this dude let's sprint we had a bug where all the lava turned into like water or something like that it looks so weird oh yeah that was definitely crazy I'm just going to run through this dungeon run back just give you guys the ground view of the size, you know, that's here in these dungeons what are some of the favorite dungeons you guys have ever played and when you played in your MMOs there's too many I really like I'll go for it I like like the cars on series and wow just like return to cars on or upper cars on just because there's such weird layouts and funky things where you like drop through portals and sizes change yeah I think my most memorable ones are probably like ashford's call and everquest because it's so dangerous to get into the good farming spots so it takes a while to get in there and like you have to like buff up and all this stuff and then once you get in there like just holding it is, you know, intense yeah I think to me I love I love those dungeon crawls where it's like you don't want to die because getting back there is horrible absolutely I remember it's horrible but it's just an intense, you know, adventure oh these guys are jumping around look at them look at them jumping oh yeah that's probably z yeah my favorite dungeons probably I would say antheris lair in Lineage too the heart area that was I had some long grinding sessions long grinding sessions in that area Lineage was a grinding game and if you had a good group in that heart you were making the best experience possible but, you know, you would always have groups run in and try to pk you or try to take that spot and it was just fun people too kind of gave me a lot of similar vibes to my old eq grinds as well oh yeah another fun one that I used to enjoy in Lineage was the force of pokers but if you were if you were like a hero you could port down into the forza poker area so you didn't have to like go through the like hour long run it took to get there and I definitely enjoyed I was a little bit of a griefer because I would I would go down there and we would always be at war with this one guild and I would oh you're gonna die and I would I would try to attack their their team as one person versus like seven of them so I would just like jump right in I just pulled one oh you leashed it back Steven's deferred I'm a fur oh yeah I don't know about look at how many bears there are here yeah but that's why I kited only one out to us oh there's a lot of bears there let me see if we can run in this here okay oh yeah this is another thing that's cool is like the world bosses oh that's bright the world bosses having them get, you know, epic epic boss rooms I love that too and like playing with the environmental hazards and stuff that's that's possible yeah I like that that reminds me I didn't really think ddo had dungeons where it was like this, you know, epic thing where you had to like crawl through it and hold on to it or anything like that but it did have some really interesting mechanics as far as like traps and stuff like that that I think was really cool and puzzles oh yeah yeah jumping possibilities maggie do you love jumping puzzles, you know, I hate jumping puzzles I'm so we need round two no yeah where's the jumping puzzle oh you got to be dismounted oh there it is it's waiting for us to go through I think but yeah alright we're going to see you back on stream hope you guys enjoyed a little little look inside the game right now I know it's been a while since we saw some footage about a month but a little talk on gathering we'll talk a little bit more on stream and we'll see you guys soon yeah thanks bye guys alright now everybody now slap alright hopefully you all enjoyed the video we'll have it kind of playing in the background here while we chat a bit I grabbed a bunch of questions from chat there's one person in particular you're spamming I'm still gonna ask your question but no need to spam I was I was snagging all the questions for y'all the first thing I do want to preface is for those of you who are new because I saw some people commenting about flying flying is not going to be like that we're not all just going to be able to fly I don't know if you guys want to talk a little bit more about that obviously we've answered this many many times yeah but we've got tons of new people yeah we got this is true so just to be clear flying is is very very very restricted it's a very powerful obviously achievement but it's restricted to the leaders of guilds that own the one of the five castles in the world as well as the mayors of metropolis stage nodes which there can only be five at a time and then there are rare drops that occur from legeNDAry world bosses that are essentially eggs that players there's a lifetime on that egg and then a lifetime on the mount sorry that's terrible and then there's there's there's essentially you can raise that up to increase the lifetime per se but it's limited so there really will only ever be maybe at a time, you know, between 10 to 15 players that are going to have access to flying mounts but they will be significant amounts they'll have abilities that are very strong all mounts will have certain types of abilities and the royal mounts will have the most effective abilities especially when it comes to PvP or aoe type effects and you won't be able to run through like we did we obviously have like gm hacks and stuff like that but you won't you shouldn't be able to like just run through the entire dungeon and skip everything necessarily yeah that wasn't a legit better experience it was more just showing you guys but you went out in the dungeon yeah also Steven you just left me there when I like pulled just that one mob for you perfectly I peeled perfectly oh yeah it wasn't about the lava bear like no they hit hard put some gm armor on you could tell that Steven's used to being the mage because I'm used to being the tank so I'm used to like pulling like little mobs like that all the time oh yeah so I do have a lot of questions I don't know if you want to go into those first if you'd rather just kind of like talk about crafting because I do want to talk about harvesting and gather bowls and crafting a little bit I know you talked about it as a like contextual but maybe going into more depth I don't know which one you want your first questions or we can do some questions just just keep in mind that obviously as we test some of these systems are going to get iterated on and then additionally I know we're going to release a blog later on that goes into some significant detail so it might be it might be smart to save some of the really detail-oriented questions for the for the blog when that comes out but yeah we can do some questions alright let me grab these questions and then we can talk about other stuff that's not covered here so nicodala picka do live liver oliver I don't know I'm probably gonna say all your names wrong so sorry say I don't harvest or gather for a couple of levels would I then fall back or fall behind in skill and not be able just stop I can't read because your name keeps covering stuff sorry not being able to gather certain resources in a higher level area yeah so the advancement and progression that exists within the artisanship path does not correlate to that of your adventuring class so you could you could not you could choose not to touch gathering at all until you max your adventure and class level out and then you can go back and that's going to be completely, you know, removed from those two things you can go back and you can start gathering, you know, the lower end tier type gatherables and start building up that profession excuse me start building up that branch of the artisanship tree and as you build it up you begin to get access to certain professions that you can then start essentially utilizing to get additional experience there which unlocks more capabilities yeah also keep in mind that the way that we're designing these these zones is it's not a progressive like this is a level 10 zone this is the level 20 zone this is level 30 zone that's not how the game is designed every level will represent and have some content for just about any level person and that goes with resources too right resources are going to be available in places where they make sense not necessarily based on we're going to put all the iron in the level 10 zone and all the mithril in the level 20 zone that's not how it's going to be functioning it'll be more more regional realistic regionalized and a little bit more it'll be less gamey and more natural I guess more organic right and the idea there is to essentially provide kind of system generated stresses based off of those placements so that regions and localities have to essentially utilize the trade systems and the caravan systems to move goods around so that players have access to their local warehouses for the materials and or gatherables in order to either process them or use them in crafting stations that come online as nodes advance so there's a significant, you know, importance on the location of these goods and how they relate to the location of the crafting centers as well yeah the economy is super important to us we want sort of a living economy which means that there is a sense of supply and demand right some regions will be will have a lot of a certain type of resources and they won't have other types of resource and it will be up to players to sort of take advantage of those those different supply and demand curves and try to maximize the amount of money they can make from it yeah we could probably take one more question margaret just because I know we have a lot of art stuff to show as well and we're already at the hour mark oh my gosh okay true true I did I did pull like 20 questions so that's probably why he could they can see how many questions okay so I'll just ask this one because it actually pertains to what you're just talking about which was selling stuff spectron 7x asked about player sales and auctions will there be any way for players to search for items before they travel to a specific node or will players be restricted to shouting advertisements in nodetowns my perspective comes from star wars galaxies and eve online both games had mechanisms for discovering that an item is sold at a location prior to traveling there so you don't waste your time kind of sure so real quick on that front there's a lot of components to that question it touches a lot of different things but on the auction house front economic nodes will have access to auction house that are local to those to those nodes and as a node progresses and begins to vassal other nodes if the parent node is economic it will have the ability to connect with those vassal nodes that are under its zone of influence and it will be able to to share the auction house in that in that regard especially at the metropolis stage additionally from a player stall or shop standpoint if you're in an economic node there will be certificates that you can purchase from the economic node main main building that will provide the license essentially the business license to us to sit down and put up a player owned shop wherever you're at in the world but you have to have the license that you purchase from the economic nodes and then additionally each node has the availability to either build a market or economic nodes or by default have player owned stalls or rented stalls sorry these stalls you can put in either services for for recipes that you have access to that players can come and interface with and utilize and you can charge a fee for it or you can list items for sale within the stall now all of those stalls and and the auction house's listings are capable of being observed so that, you know, where to go to get certain things on a community board essentially where you can access the town center's community board and it will show you the location and items that you can search through and then you'll have to travel to that location if you don't have access to either an integrated auction house hub or the stahls not present in that location yeah we actually have an article about economic notes a lot of stuff that Steven talked about is in there and even goes into more detail so if you want to go check that out it's on our news news page Ashes of Creation dot com slash news you can find it through the node series which is called economic known so you should be able to find it pretty easily I know we still have more in that series that are coming along but design is still finalizing the military one and the divine one so we haven't put those out yet because we want to make sure that they're pretty much in a like more finalist shape before we like share that information with you all so with that we know we have a lot of questions I just want to preface that normally we do do we do do a Q&A segment on our live stream obviously this time we're not because we did an AMA for a really long time if you want to check that out it's on our youtube youtube.com Ashes of Creation but we will be doing another Q&A for our next one so stay tuned for that and we'll let you guys know in advance we usually announce that like a week in advance before our live stream so you have time to plug in your question and then toast who's amazing our lovely community manager she'll put together the ones that have have already been answered and answer those for you and the ones that haven't we'll put into our live stream for that so stay tuned for that so without further ado we're going to move on to environment art the first thing we have here is the wonderful particle effects this is another wonderful thing from Jim we have shown some of the waterfalls in the past but I'll let Steven kind of talk a little bit about this they're so pretty yeah I think just part of the process that goes into iteration over the art assets that enter the game, you know, we had some old waterfalls that didn't necessarily live up to snuff and how the world was progressing so Jim took a pass on those and as you can see, you know, not only do the effects look great but the updated water shader also, you know, is starting to look really good these will continue to go through iterations as we get closer to launch but as you can see already in this pre-alpha state, you know, I think this this looks great they look very natural they look very immersive in the world and it's also great because they're way more performant than the old ones were like way more and they look about as much better which is great it's always great when you when you gain on the performance side and on the visual side you're like oh wait that's not supposed to be the case but yeah it looks great yeah it looks wonderful people are saying this is their yoga spot we got some yogis out there I like it and our next one is going to be the seaside environment assets that mia made I love the I love when I when I do the stream because I never have time to review the assets prior and so this is all just like oh okay yes you probably see it when you're running around in the world but like you don't realize like yeah yeah mia is a is a wonderful artist she is so talented and and experienced and I mean you can just see the detail and, you know, the tender love and care that goes into creating these these environment assets, you know, really to make the world look like a beautiful place I mean it's immersion such an important component in our gameplay experience and part of that immersive quality comes down to to to the sheer the sheer talent that goes into our amazing artists creating this world so yeah these look I love these yeah they're great and then the next set of assets we have here are the junior node buildings that ricky made yeah ricky ho one of our one of our concept artists as he begins to kind of diversify the selection of architecture for the duner race and all the in and the other races working with our talented concept team, you know, they provide these production ready concept pieces in order for the production artists the 3d modelers on the environment side to really stick to this architectural design in creating these assets so part of 'Alpha 1' excuse me part of 'Alpha 1' and moving forward into the different testing phases because the nodes adopt the predominant culture that gave the node experience to advance it renders the appropriate culture to represent the the race that that helped establish that node so we start flushing out additional buildings, you know, these are constructed in a modular fashion so that they can be mixed and matched to some degree to help not only speed up the production time but also provide devin one of our environment artists who created a great building tool that you may see a dev diary on our youtube page of where essentially you can go through these modular sets and start just pumping out a lot of different buildings and the concepts here help to guide those those necessities yeah I'm just going to go through them quick yeah that's a good idea yeah but as you can see these are these are mostly what it looks like village stage building variants that exist within the near the duneur culture the duneer being a more traditional type of a dwarven race that you might expect from medieval fantasy games and, you know, it's always interesting that these mostly usually dwarves are portrayed inside of a mountain but here you're going to see literal settlements that are out in the grasslands or out in the tundra or wherever there might be in whatever biome and that's going to I think present a really cool really cool and unique presentation for a more traditional type mountain dwelling race I almost timed it perfectly with your mountain with your grassland and your tundra go for it Jeff oh I was just going to say the dwarves haven't had enough time to excavate the mountains yet when they arrived so right exactly love it they haven't cleared out the dark corrupt denizens that may exist in the object now we get to move on to our character art team who submitted a lot of great stuff so we're going to switch on over to that first and foremost we have some swimming I know a lot of folks have asked about swimming so I'll let Steven talk over this yeah so I mean as you guys know there is in there's a lot of water content that's planned you didn't see there in the transition from the above camera shader to the below camera shader any type of screen effect that will be applied later like, you know, water kind of drying up or something but as you can see, you know, this is some some fuNDAmental swimming you will be able to utilize your abilities while in the water there is going to be naval contents that will require, you know, large groups of of people participating in water combat as well as a ship to ship type combat so we're now just starting to flesh out essentially those the buoyancy and physics of the of the ocean as well as giving the character animation blueprint the ability to transition from a land state to a water state that utilizes these animations which our animation team has has taken a first pass on I think they're doing good it's good yeah and like we said this is early past so bear with us, you know, these aren't this isn't vinyl or anything like that and we will have some other adjustments to it as well but if you have suggestions and stuff like that you're always welcome to head on over to our forums we love reading all that toast is amazing and puts together reports every month for the dev team so that is the best place if you have feedback or suggestions the best place to go is honestly our forums because we put together reports for those it's easier for us to grab data if you're pm'ing people it's really hard for us to grab the pms from all of Steven right like we're not going to make reports on that that's not happening so but if you put on the forums we are able to grab, you know, we're able to grab that data and easily send it over to the design I'm just prefacing Steven yeah no no it's good because over the past two weeks since I did a, you know, those three interviews I think I've had like 9 000 linkedin views and probably about a thousand linkedin messages and probably like 3 000 discord dms and I got like I try my best to read the dms as much as I can I definitely read the forums and the content creation that happens and the reddit that's a little bit easier to get to for me right right now my phone actually crAshes if I try to access my dms on discord so I can't do that but I can do it from the desktop but we do put together reports for Steven and the design team and whatnot so definitely that's the best way is the forums if you have questions we have a questions channel in our discord that's a fantastic place to go beyond that toast and I try our best to get through all the messages and violet as well like we try our best to go through all of those things and all of our social media but the best way to provide feedback is over on the forums yeah and of course if you have a cs problem the best place is to put in a ticket so without that we're gonna go on to the next one you all have really really loved our lovely goblin friend and now we have one of the variants completed so you can see it with textures look how awesome he is yeah this is this is one of the npc monsters that represents one of the tribes of the goblin race in the world as a adversary he is he is definitely on the green side [Music] people have been asking for him at their like goblin playable race I'm like not not currently planned doesn't I'm never going to say never but not well we already have nine technically through the monster coin system there are potentially events that will occur where you may have multiple of these npcs grouping up to kind of disabled services at a node and will require the response of the citizens and if you have a monster coin available you could play as a goblin for a short period of time or some other type of monster and the more you play and become successful during those events in helping to kind of disable the nodes that exist not destroy them you will be able to get unique cosmetics as a participation achievement in in those monster coin systems so that's something that's interesting you're not wrong yeah I was like actually I didn't think about the monster coin system yeah like maybe you can get his loin cloth and then you just wear the loincloth on your character and it's a goblin loincloth, you know, that'd be great so our next one here is actually robes speaking of clothing we're going to show the kayla robes here we'll start with the starter one and then like a level up of that alright I think I saw the gray scale on this just the grayscale version oh okay got it yeah yeah that's all this is we'll show textures probably next month or something so this is one of one of the very early kind of is this an npc or is this character our armor I think this might be pc yeah so this yeah I was gonna say I don't see the cuts I was like that's interesting yeah this would be an, you know, as we construct different armor sets for npcs to mix and match with you're going to see more of this more of these npc clothing and armor that comes online this one looks like a character this one looks like character I can see the pieces on the arm and the coat and stuff yes level up of it so maybe they're both players yeah I guess they are one yeah yeah level one okay so this is progressive so essentially, you know, we're showing kind of how these character armors are constructed they gradually increase in silhouette size not because your armor is going to progress per se in the game but on a production side in the game actually in the in the development of the game, you know, we use base pieces to help level up these these these armors and grow the silhouette so that they become appropriate pieces that can be utilized in further in higher tier armor sets that the players can achieve and then they get diversified through the materials and the textures and the colors and thematic components that can be applied as attachments these essentially get get, you know, diversified [Music] alright and then our next one here is the spellbreakers gauntlet oh this one's nice so this is a cosmetic now this is the final model this is the finished model this is not this is the concept art this is not concept so this this gauntlet here was a cosmetic when was this cosmetic was it a long time ago I could look but I'd have to oh actually I can look right now I don't have to be on vpn for it well yeah long time ago basically your armor exists in a I believe it's an eight p eight p set that you can individually apply cosmetic appearances towards so you would have a a glove a glove armor piece that you would then apply this this what's it called the gauntlet of spellbreaker's gauntlet spellbreaker's gauntlet so you can apply this cosmetic appearance to the gauntlet now this in the game this this portrays a little 3d effects above the gauntlet that will be rotating and it might actually glow and brighten as you cast an ability or an ability effect occurs right it might call the glow to to to animate and move but this is the in-game model of that spellbreaker's gauntlet my cat has interrupted the chat's probably it was pretty great when we could just see the tail it would be the July 2018 to August 2018. thank you violet lights for sending that my way you were looking down where's the time gone I feel like my life is flying by I know it's crazy it's just game design one large game design I don't remember living before starting Intrepid my headspace has been completely vacated and now only exists in Ashes so the next ones we have are all of the creature stuff so this is a lot of the creature animation and creature particle effects so the first one is going to be actually the troll and it's specifically you're looking at the particle effects on the attack so as you're looking at this don't look at the other things look at specifically the particle effects on the attack okay yeah so this is just some some pretty simple effects on the on the attack animations that you're seeing which, you know, give it a little bit more a little bit more oomph as you see different creatures attacks occur yeah before we were using kind of generically generic sort of particle events for impacts and stuff and this is sort of integrating some of those like to the actual animation of the creatures that are using it so it's it's a little bit more couture it gives kind of it reduces the amount of sort of genericness to the npcs and gives them character so yeah I like that you use the word couture it's one of those words I'm never sure if I'm going to use it right no it's that was a good that was a good word say I'm putting alright next we have our war beast animation we showed a little bit of the warbies before and people lost their minds so enjoy this now and this is like the war beast is agency creation she's amazing hi ginseng someday I'll get you on the stream yay I think it's so huge it's massive yeah yeah it's too bad we don't have a scale next to it but this dude's pretty big like elephant size was it right or maybe a little bit smaller yeah I think he's a little bit smaller than elephant but but there's a variant of him that's gargantuan and carries siege this carries one of the siege weapons the first one that gypsy made Steven was like that is huge yeah look how pretty he is oh look he has a little scene oh yeah they got very excited about showcasing him thank you tristan can you just imagine being in the game and you just hear this like thundering movement over like a hill and you just turn that thing comes at you this thing breaks the horizon and it's just like this dude is charging you and you're just like huh what do you do here I run right that happened to us in a pathfinder game one time kevin was dming and there was a herd of I believe it was bison and we were like level two and one of our people had been trampled so we tried to like help him and then they trampled us and killed the entire party I don't think it was bison I think it was something else yeah tpk by bison it was a big creature though at least the one that I was part of we had a similar situation like that and mcp was also the one damning he loves killing people with herds yeah the next one is going to be our ram so you saw this last week you saw the ram it looks so good yeah we're definitely refining their their fur and hair cards it's like that scraggly goat hair, you know, yeah yeah this looks great I think I think this was carson that did this little dude excuse me sorry about that the not the animations of them but the no no no no sorry he did the model yeah I'm not sure who did these animations that might be myers I believe there it is oh but there he is with his caravan yeah so this is a this is a duneer influenced caravan you can see by the bulkiness and the armor plating on the on the spokes and the wheels and this is in game, you know, the different types of caravans that you can own essentially as you commission them will take the appearance of the cosmetic you have applied and then our next one is going to be our lovely spider first this is the turntable with the spider so you can see the entire model of it so this is an enemy npc that's going to be, you know, obviously arachnids are a favorite a fan favorite when it comes to fantasy games, you know, and this is one of the initial spider creatures that are used there's a several variants ginsee modeled these and, you know, they're going to see if you're making the translucent one that was like I was going to make a translucent one she's like I'll try yeah so these are just some examples of the different spider spiderlings and they'll vary in size as well, you know, you have some that are very large up to the head height of a character and some that are smaller, you know, maybe to the kneecaps, you know, shanky and the knees that little spider will do probably but yeah these are these look good I like these yeah they're awesome I like their little hair pieces and obviously well different types of spiders too like not just they won't all be this like hairy spider type although all the people who are afraid of spiders are probably horrified right now hey it's good to face your fears MMO's help in that regard [Laughter] makes you stronger yeah all those little mandible wiggles well he's hungry he hasn't probably eaten in a while oh that's so creepy nope nope I'm running oh my god look at his mouth it has teeth why does it have teeth [Laughter] I thought it's just supposed to have mandibles it has teeth imagine it's spitting out like acid and stuff too oh no [Music] could you imagine if you had a small mesh where you couldn't see the spider it was like one of those funnel spiders on the beach and as you're walking past just like it erupts out of the ground and attacks having those randomly placed throughout the world not so much like in a hunting ground where, you know, but like just random spawners of funnel spiders that pop out of the ground and you walk over it and you don't even know that there's a spider underneath you because it's like it's like a flat on the ground oh my gosh on it is totally off so oh yeah yes and you just hear the like the clapping of the mandibles and the teeth that'd be great it'd be cool if we could integrate that with like future, you know, computer seats that have like a tactile response and win that event yeah when that event occurs the seat touches you, you know, what I mean fantastic oh yeah it would definitely be crazy losing players to heart attacks yeah we need to add that to our scope creep by the way creation of tactile seats that integrate with calls in game first is that gonna go with our vr experience just kidding I'm just kidding oh no and and I think you made a good point about like feature creep and stuff because I have seen a lot of comments regarding that and we're obviously going to wrap up our show today but we are always going to be conscious of our production line our producers are amazing and making sure that we can stick to our schedule obviously we're kind of a little bit of a head schedule in some aspects because everyone's working from home and really focused yeah we have a lot of stuff that we want to put into the game doesn't mean everything's gonna make it at every milestone doesn't mean everything's gonna make it at launch so just keep that in mind but we'll set the expectations with the content that we put out on our news site we'll always let you guys know what is gonna be coming up stay tuned for that we have a lot of articles for 'Alpha 1' coming out that will talk about each of the classes because I know classes in combat are one of the major things you all want to hear about as Jeff and his design team finalize each of the classes that are going to be in alpha I believe there's going to be six of them correct for alpha there's gonna be five prof I believe okay five yes yeah so we'll be releasing an article about each of those as well as some video content so you'll know which abilities are going to be there what what like what stage it will be and also like the next milestone after that after 'Alpha 1' so kind of what kind of feedback we're looking for for each of those things and then we'll also have stuff for systems and the races and things of that sort so stay tuned we've got a lot of stuff to share with you all so without further ado I will wrap up the show unless you guys have anything else you want to add yeah absolutely just wanted to reiterate I know that right now because of the exposure over the last couple weeks a lot of new eyes are on the project and and again I want to thank everybody for, you know, their support in in lending to this discussion about what an m what makes MMORPGs great we we we cannot thank you guys enough for, you know, coming and joining on the discord subscribing to social media on twitter on on youtube on facebook, you know, you guys at 10k insta so I can have the swipe up I need the swipe up mechanic so with that being said however I do want to make sure we we we temper that hype by letting, you know, this is a process our goal is to create a quality product that has a good launch and that means making sure that we take our time to ensure the quality of that product that it makes you guys proud it makes us proud so there is still a long road obviously ahead but, you know, the great thing about a transparent development is you get to watch us all along that way and I know it's it's difficult to to see this the, you know, the game and and hear the philosophies and the ideas and and just not be overcome with complete grief that you can't play right now but I've always said that, you know, patience is bitter but it's fruit is sweet so having that patience and and keeping with us along this development period we all appreciate that at the studios it is a it is a significant motivator for our developers to to just see the sheer love coming from our community so we appreciate that so much and and and we love you guys from the studios thank you so much and to the people who are like our og folks who have been super helpful I also want to give a shout out to you have been answering a lot of questions being really kind to the new folks welcoming them in and we greatly appreciate that like the words cannot describe how because there's been a lot of people that even toast and I and violet are not able to necessarily, you know, answer so thank you so much yeah MMOs live and die by their community and we've got one of the best ones in the industry absolutely yep so without that with with that we'll wrap things up reminders I'll just go through them really quick we do have new emotes on the discord definitely go check them out they're so adorable we are trying to get them on twitch so stay tuned for that we'll we'll do our best to link up with them and get that going we do have a bonus dev discussion this month which is multi-boxing so definitely go answer that that's going to be wrapping up July 6th because toast has to put together a report for the dev team so that they can go talk and discuss it it's going to be heated I'm sure and then we also have another one coming up for August we won't skimp yet on any dev discussions as Jeff and his team have a lot of questions that they would like to hear the community's perspective on beyond that our monthly cosmetic swap over will be at 11 a.m August 5th 2020 so stay tuned for that we will be showcasing the new set soon so stay tuned for that and the last but not least we have our test coming up if you are leader of men or phoenix initiative definitely check your email we'll be sending out another update today for folks who did not sign yet or if you're still in the ticket system it might catch you as well we definitely need people to sign it so definitely check your inbox it might be in your spammer junk but definitely go check that and reply so that we can get you all flagged up and get you ready for testing because we want to start doing our next test here in August and we need that done first without with that we lastly don't forget that our statue all you have to do is register on our site you don't have to do anything else no payment or anything just register on our account register an account anybody from april 7th 2020 to september 7th 2020 will get access to that I think I can put that up on the screen again including all previous registrations yeah including all previous registrations yeah that's true I guess I didn't need a start date for it I don't know why I was thinking that I'm just so used to having a start and end date for things my mind and that's it so thank you Jeff thank you Steven for taking time out of your day I know you both are very extremely busy so we really super duper appreciate it thank you to all of you who tuned in we appreciate it thank you to the entire Intrepid studios everyone has done an amazing job of, you know, kind of showcasing