Talk:2018-04-23 Dungeon Crawler Network podcast interview with creative director Steven Sharif

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0:32

Welcome to From the Ashes, the Dungeon Crawler Network podcast all about Ashes of Creation by Intrepid Studios. Bear witness to the rebirth of the MMORPG genre from the ashes of the industry that has left the gamers behind. I am your host Aggelos and this is an amazing episode yeah that's right. We'll just have to introduce him right off the bat. You can already see Steven Sharif Creative Director over at Intrepid Studios. How are you, sir?

I am very good thank you for having me I'm excited to be here I love watching the show- wait for the awesome conversation we're going to have about Ashes.

All right all right thank you so much for coming on and I know we had this conversation pre-show but in just under two weeks it will have been one year since the very first episodes. Actually from the date of this recording it's two weeks and one day, this show has been around for one year and that was kicked off by our first interview on May third during the Kickstarter.

That is just honestly like mind blowing. I can not believe that it has been a year since that May third interview I remember like it was yesterday. It was crazy in the middle of the second day of that Kickstarter I think we had just had a million dollars by that time and I was sitting at that conference table chatting with you as everyone's hair was on fire running around getting stuff ready doing live streams every other day, that was that I was a crazy time I can't believe it was a year ago

A year ago. It was amazing you guys have come so far in that time and you know we're gonna talk about that here in a little bit before I do we got to also give a little bit of love to - oh my goodness I just realized my camera's all messed up. I'll fix that. In the meantime, but Alfa Soul who is actually in Storm's Lord's place right now, how are you buddy?

I'm doing good. I'm doing real good.

I set up the the name plates before I actually put the cameras together so the lay out is actually you're where Storm's Lords was supposed to be but it's easier.

So I'm that new Storms?

You are the new Storms.

I'm in my own office, I think I'm okay but you never know.

And Storms how are you buddy?

I'm doing awesome. Recovering from PAX but it was great.

Awesome, awesome so we have-

Yeah, I got to meet Storms actually at PAX. I saw you at the panel.

Absolutely. You guys impressed the heck out of my sons.

Oh really? That's awesome.

Loving it.

That is awesome. I'm glad to hear that. Where did you come from to get to PAX?

Detroit.

Ah Detroit okay. That's a little bit of a trip.

Took three of my son's, cut across Canada, you know. Had fun road trip.

Oh that's awesome. That's cool. You know what, some of the guys in the office are still recovering from PAX.

They played PUBG until like one o'clock in the morning, so.

3:30

The sad part is I think I got PAX plague and I didn't even get to go. That's the worst part of it. Oh man, it's been awful. Anyway, so let's go ahead. We're gonna jump right on into our little interview. But we have a bunch of questions lined up, which I'm gonna let Storms and Alpha soul handle this; but I have to ask Steven: You guys showed up PAX East right, you know, what was the general reception to Ashes that you saw there? Did you get any interesting feedback from any of the people?

Yeah, you know honestly the reception that we received was very warm. It was very positive. First of all, we did encounter a lot of people who weren't even aware of Ashes of Creation. That's obviously one of the benefits of going to an event like PAX is that you get to spread the word a little bit about the project, but I think what people are more astonished by was the fact that you know Ashes - everything they saw in that experience that they got to experience there was built in less than six months, right? We launched that alpha zero, December fifteenth of last year and they were, I think that the majority of people were just astonished by the fact that this is a game in pre-alpha and it already looks like this. Given the time before we go to live launch, imagine what like then. We got good feedback obviously about you know our combat, I think that's it a common response from people is regards to to the combat; and you know we constantly had to remind people, this is a very early look at the game we believe in transparency. we want a community that's going to be a part of the process of development and it's important for us to to make sure that those lines of communications are open throughout the entire process. So, we had to explain, you know, we really haven't spent any time on combat; and that's during our next milestone is really focusing on that combat and it's gonna be beneficial for people to be able to look back at videos of the early iterations on combat and then see how far it's come in what period of time to really give people an understanding of the work that's being done. The massive amount of work that's being done on this project.

5:43

Right and I know we had talked about this in the past you've had stated it in videos before that on Alpha 0 has been going on and this was mostly technical and I know you guys I guess are doing a proprietary network backend. How is that testing been going like?

It's going pretty good actually. So, funny thing about our alpha 0 when we began with our projected date on December 15th we had probably about seventyish percent, seventy five percent, I would say of our users that were in the Alpha 0 testing that were trying to log into the - I don't know if this is been mentioned yet - but there was a network setting that we were calling a ping to the client's router basically, their connection, and their router didn't have a port open for that ping, so they would get stopped at the login screen, which was this windmill: A vista of like a volcano in the background and I mean you guys get somewhere and that that quickly became referred to as the windmill boss during December and so you know, as just a point of levity, I had one of my concept artists take that scene and change the windmill into a boss that had some teeth and a mouth and eyes and fire coming out of the mouth and throw some alpha testers in front of the windmill, because the the common meme was that everyone was getting slain by the the windmill boss.

Right.

Yeah I was pretty good but I mean eventually we were able to fix that issue. You know, we saw over a hundred people connected at a single point in time on a single dedicated server for a single zone that was four kilometers by four kilometers roughly sixteen square kilometers along with four thousand NPCs and we were able to achieve a frame rate on the server above sixty FPS and for those of you who you know a lot of people see FPS they think you know this is how good and quickly my screens moving but we're not talking client side FPS client side of PS was always fairly good. It was the server FPS and that means that when the server sending out instructions are packets or information to the different clients such as your position in relation to other players, your position in relation to monsters - whether or not your strike plays a server effects or deals damage to a target - the server has to have a FPS that's operating at roughly I would say with optimal performance to be above thirty FPS in order for that to appear seamless, so that there's no hiccups; and we were getting about sixty FPS. And with the number of monsters and players present in that alpha test in these alpha tests that we've been doing since December 15th we've been really really satisfied with that performance.

8:42

Right and I know there was some criticism along the line of you know have we seen enough progress in the year since this was first seen at PAX west and things of that nature and I always have to stress to people: Networking is not glorious and it's hard to convey the amount of work that goes into that in videos, 'cause you can't tell, but trust me, in-game you'll feel that network difference. You can feel the work that's there it's hard for people to see that. You're like, we're working on a custom network backend, but that's not flashy that's not, you know, but it's important and you do feel it when the game is there.

I mean and not only that; and yes like from the network perspective there was a lot of work done from West to East but from PAX West to PAX East you have to think of you know PAX West was a was a single small, less than probably half a kilometer square area that was confined to one path that moved forward. It didn't have character persistence. It didn't have character progression. It didn't have experience gains. It didn't have drops. It didn't have certain skill mechanics that are present. When we went to PAX West [East] we were going with our alpha zero build; and the alpha zero build with this large zone that had probably twenty five different creature types that had quest lines that were developed; that had persistence - you can log out and log back in and everything is saved; that had inventory with different items: a whole bunch of tiers of items that were present. Now the difficulty and the reason why you know some people said this is similar to PAX West, well the reason is, our our targeted approach on how to give players at PAX West and experience or PAX East or any trade show for that matter is that we cannot show an MMORPG in ten minutes. You know there is a lot more intact [audio drop] than what you have time for to show at a trade show. So you know showing off our node system and how that develops and collects experience that's a far more intricate system that will take a lot of time to actually show a node progress from one stage to another, even though we have that in alpha zero. So, instead we want to do is give players an immersion into the world; have a GM guide them through explaining generally the systems and ideas that sets Ashes of Creation apart from other MMOs and allow them to participate in a story, right, because the story is something that people can get invested it and that's why we choose to do the quest or the quest line that players can participate in. So you know, that's our approach to how we show Ashes on a trade show in ten minutes to people.

11:32

Absolutely, and I'm going to let my co-host take over for the normal questions but I have one more that I know the Ashes of Creation community would hate me if I didn't ask: Nodes part three when's it coming?

[Laughter] Okay so our philosophy on the node series is we really want to show the degree of progress from the last node video to the next note video that's gonna be coming out: Nodes part three. Now while we're in the process of of currently making Nodes part three, the delay between those two parts is so that, as this time has passed people who come back and take a look at Ashes or people who are seeing Ashes for the first time are really seeing a whole new level of development from when the other Nodes videos were done, which is really before our major production started which was after Kickstarter. So, that's the reason for the delay between those two different parts: part two and part three, but we are currently working and my answer is soon trademark.

[Laughter] You knew that was common so.

Oh yeah, for sure. No no no.

Yeah.

The node series are a great series they get into some design a heavy focus on the node system, which although you know the communities heard so much about nodes, there really is so much more to also go in-depth about. That's all president and we do want to really define that feature of the game because it is our most identifying feature. It's what sets us most apart from any other MMO that's ever come out and we believe that it will be the system that keeps players invested in the game for a long period of time.

Right. Are you guys one of you guys take over. I think you guys hammered out which questions you guys are answering or asking.

13:29

Yeah, well I'll pick up with the the one that was going to ask the panel but they just didn't fit the the venue. So, the first one I got from the guild members was: when will this summer backers get upgrade rights?

That is a great question. And actually, the summer backers can currently get upgrades. If the, yes we implemented that actually I believe it was the week, last week when we got back from PAX; and the way that Summer backers can do that is if your logged into your account and you can check that out if you want I'm not sure if your summer backer, but if you're logged into your account and you go to the store page you will see in the all section upgrade paths to different packages from your summer package; and that should be present right now in the-

Awesome. Good answer

So all of you summer backers who've been looking for an upgrade, you don't have excuse anymore, go.

In addition, we did it update concept [art] for the summer backer addons that Kickstarter backers may purchase through their normal dashboard. So, Kickstarter backers you may now see actual representations of those concepts from the Summer campaign and you may purchase them if you wish as add ons through your dashboard, your account dashboard.

Now see that'll have to do, as well as upgrading my kickstarter.

I already did that before they were even done. So, I'm sad.

Storms, I think you muted yourself there bud.

Yeah we can't hear you Storms.

15:14

Oh the dreaded mute button. Um why he's working on that, I'll answer, ask the next question here and he'll just have to jump in. Can you explain to us a little bit more about how Castle sieges are gonna work. 'Cause I know nodes this is something that you and I talked about in the past, where we're expecting nodes as they level up and do their thing that there's a good chance - and again this is all player agency - but there's a good chance that nodes may exist, you know, take months to get up to max and once they're max they may maintain, be maintained for months if not years. It's all up to the players. You know, leadership within the node may change but the mother node may not be destroyed. But I'm assuming castles are going to be a little bit more of the fluid, you know, back and forth can you explain to us a little bit about how you envision those to work?

Yeah, so castles in the Ashes of Creation will be on a cycle of siegeability, meaning that guilds will be able to sign up to either siege or defend a castle. Now you don't need to be the owner of the castle or in the guilds that, excuse me, or in the guild that owns a castle in order to sign up for the defense of the castle. The guild leader that owns the castle will be able to approve guilds that have applied to defend at the castle and then guilds that wish to siege the castle will be required to be of a certain level - meaning that they will have had to progress their guilt to a certain point - and they will have to undergo a crafting process that will utilize the masters of each crafting type: Gathering processing and crafting in the artisanship tree in order to create a declaration flag. Now, when they do create that declaration flag they may, during the period of time right before the siege of the castle, which is one week out to - the castle's siege rotation will be monthly once per month; and obviously everything here is something we're going to be testing, but you may then declare with that declaration flag your intent to siege the castle; and the defender it will have a week grace period before that scheduled siege period that they can approve defenders, lay down mercenaries, NPCs, different defensible positions at the castle. Now another important aspect of castle sieges work is that castle sieges come with 3 dedicated nodes. Excuse me, castles, castles themselves. Castles themselves come with 3 dedicated nodes. These notes exist outside of the node system, so they're independent of anything that's happening outside in the world with other nodes shutting off certain notes from progressing. Now these nodes that are dedicated to the castle can only be brought up to the village stage and they must be brought up through through questing by either alliance guilds or the owner, owning guild of the castle; and that questing involves taking caravans and supplies from existing nodes in the world to the dedicated castle note in order [audio drop] during different weeks before the cycle period of siege. Now, what that means is if they manage to get those supplies and complete those quests to level up those nodes, they'll unlock certain services that are handy to the leader of the guild that owns that castle as well as any allied guilds that may participate in certain functions and services that those nodes could provide for the castle. But more importantly though boost the defenses of that castle itself so as those caravans are moving from nodes to the castle dedicated nodes, rival guild will want to destroy those caravans and prevent them from leveling up the castle dedicated nodes. If they fail to to level up those nodes or complete those quests within the 3 prior weeks before the declaration week, then the castle will be at a disadvantage: it'll be in [audio drop] state are during the siege period. Now sieges work in a way that obviously they're going to be different siege weaponry that will grant the attackers the ability to destroy walls, destroy different sections of the castle in order to gain access to the inter keeps area. They're also be able to destroy the doors that exist to gain access that way and then it's going to be a matter of capturing waypoints in the castle's architecture; and if you are able to capture those you'll be diminishing your respawn timer and increasing the respawn timer of the defenders. So, defenders also have a counter play with that, that they may attack the siege headquarters of the attacking guilds diminishing their declaration flags to increase their timers as a reciprocation. There will also be legendary NPCs that will be present as commanders and act as a sort of mini raid boss for raids within the defending or attacking siege participants, to try to kill those for added benefits as well, as well as getting certain types of drops that can gran battlefield benefits to the players on either side. Then the ultimate obviously objective [audio drop] the defenders to either survive during the timed period of the siege, which will be probably between an hour and a half - I'll say I think 90 minutes is our first test - and if they do not survive, the attackers will need to reach the inner keep of the castle and there will be a casting ability that's present on guild leaders of a certain level, and then one other delegated person who can also cast as well, a chosen officer that can cast on behalf of the guild leader. So those two people are capable of casting a long cast, probably be about 3 to 5 minutes depending on what waypoint captured [audio drop] will also diminish that cast time and that once they do that they will have sealed the castle for their ownership.

That actually sounds incredibly fun. I'm really excited.

That does sound-

Sounds good.

Tremendously awesome.

21:55

A little bit of a follow-up on this one. This one can be a really quick answer: Like you said that these castles and and the nodes that are independent of the node system from a lore perspective are these going to be like the only "persistent" towns in cities: these castle towns and castles within the world of Verra when we come in? Like will every server have these castles available so you can always go oh here it is, but the nodes outside of that change?

So the castles that will exist [audio drop] and the castles that exist at launch will be occupied by an NPC adversary. These are the primary antagonists in the storyline; and the guilds will have to obviously level a period of time to level up in order to siege and they'll be very difficult to take these out of the NPCs hands. So, the the actual structure of nodes around these castles will not be present as static structures. Additionally, each of the dedicated castle nodes is barren at the start of the castle ownership period, so if I capture the castle and I own that castle for a month before I'm sieged again. That first week node A, which is a dedicated castle node will be unbuilt and I will have one week to build that node up through questing, moving caravans and supplies, and having people come and participate in leveling that up. Now that'll be a hastened level up process. It won't be the same level up to a stage 3 that you might see from a normal node, but it's going to be based on the questing aspect. The second week I'll need to level up node B: I can utilize - if I was successful on node A's development - that will aid me in leveling up node B for that castle. Now node C is in the third week and then at that point the fourth week begins that's the declaration week. That is when other guilds have the opportunity to lay down their declaration flag and other guilds have the opportunity to attempt and sign up as defender of the castle. So they won't be static and present there once that [audio drop] process will happen [audio drop] and there'll be benefits to attracting people to - even if they're not in your guild or alliance - kind of a feudal like system where you can attract other players who are just independent of this whole politic; and they'll have things to do there - benefits to receive - and there'll be a reciprocal relationship between who you can attract, what they do for you; and how that benefits you and them.

Okay cool. Are you guys pass it back to you.

Right. Alfa gear up.

24:47

Alright cool so good. Next question what role do the 3 houses like the Thieves Guild the Craftsman Union, what role do they have aside from augments.

So, they have a role in providing assets for gathering certain tools that make your gathering better they have a role in [audio drop] keys and providing blueprints for certain processing infrastructure you may want to build on a freehold. They grant different services depending on who their patron node is. So, if you if you're part of a town that's been developed and the Scholar's Academy has the most amount of work from the players, that becomes a patron organization of the city so will grant certain benefits and services to players that they can participate in that relate to their position within the Scholar's academy. Augments are a huge thing that these different societies will offer. They're not going to be a lot of arguments within the society's progression, it'll probably be around 3 or 4 that exist per organization. So you'll have to really investigate and study which organization is most beneficial for the path you've chosen with your archetype or whatever role you wish to have in the world. But there's also going to be, you know: You'll get special lures for fishing. You'll have a special cosmetics that you can get from a certain society. Maybe want to change the appearance, you can get specific furniture for your home that you're going to build. You can get specific mount certificates for your breeding. I mean there's a lot of different- the whole idea of these societies is that they are a mechanism for progression that do not have to rely on your level progression. These are different progression paths that players can participate in. If you don't want to leave a node in your game play experience and you want to find as much as you can do with in that city, these offer those things. Now, some quests might take you outside of the city to you know hunt and and pursue things but you could also perfectly be a person that is a merchant and purchases than from other travelers instead of having to go do it yourself. We want to offer players a diverse method of progression; and these systems house those benefits.

27:14

Excellent excellent. All right next question: How does plan to make reading have real weight and lore behind it?

Yes well I think probably [audio drop] in our previous games is that raiding really becomes extremely repetitive. You know it is something that you pretty much have it on your calendar okay at this time the boss respawns and we need to be there and we were the first to down it or you know you just log in at this time our raid's ready to go. We want things to be more fluid and one of the ways that we make them more fluid is through our triggered event system. As the world is advancing, building up you know we've spoken about how bosses will be awoken and come and attack the city and stuff like: That is one of the methods by which we make these more spontaneous we make them more accessible to a wider audience you can be just in the city and not normally be a part of a raid team but now get to participate in this organic event that's kind of popped up around the city and if you are not participating then buildings are gonna get destroyed in and NPCs are going to die and now there's a [audio drop] associated with a raid. It's not just how fast can we do it, how will we get it done in its schedule, but oh my god this thing popped up if we don't kill it we're not going to access to our stables this week and we can't get our our animal husbandry certificates right, so it's like it's that it's that risk versus reward that gives you a sense of adrenaline. You have to participate as opposed to this monotony of scheduled raiding. This is one example.

Not that was good.

Very nice.

Thank you.

29:09

So then I'll jump in. Another question that the guild had was will the development team be playing Ashes as players or will they make their appearances like old school you know GMs in the game.

The answer to that is both. We will be doing both. You won't know who we are as players [audio drop]

Steven I think you're breaking up there are just a tad bit we got a whole you won't know who we are as players but

Oh okay. Oh okay. How 'bout now?

Yeah

Am I good now?

Good now.

Alright sorry. We'll be doing both. You won't know who we are as players, but also when we're on our GM [audio drop] a little bit of both.

29:56

All right awesome. Can you elaborate a bit more on the story in question in the world? In a dev diary it was mentioned that player's choices of drive the world. How does it work with an X amount of players competing in the same quest?

So, I mean our quest system from a narrative standpoint really is respective of two primary arcs: There's going to be the overarching story that relates to the decisions of the community how the world gets developed what major storyline events have been accomplished with the downing of world bosses; or the discovery of certain types of relics; or the persistence of certain notes to a certain time state, and when it achieves that unlock something that the players didn't know existed and they'll get to participate in that; and then there's the individual narrative and how these overarching stories kind of relate to you as a player. Now when you go out and you do a quest and that quest gives you - you know you need to kill the boss at the end of this dungeon - you know that quest needs to be accessible by all players. They'll be able to participate sometimes as a group or individually. There might even be different directories of the quest that exist for specific races, and even though you're sharing a quest to kill a boss if you're human and I'm an elf, I will have a different arc potentially that leads in a different direction than you even though we took the same quest; and I can relate to kind of who the primary cultural contributor is to a node unlocking different arcs for cultures that share the primary culture of a node - not that locks out content but it gives a flavor in a different direction so that not everything is so cookie cutter; and the way we achieve that is by obviously you know when you create your character character has a tag in the back and that demonstrates what culture it is and when NPCs get populated in a city based on the primary culture contribution to that city's development, those NPCs are going to react differently to different tags on your character, so I come up as an Elven an Elven city it's going to talk to me differently than if I were human coming up to a quest giver in an Elven city. And those quests will include different flavors for the different races by that way.

I'm thinking like Divinity right?

Right a little bit yeah. A little bit.

Alright cool right.

Tag you're it.

32:38

Alright I'm up again. What are what are your plans for player developer communication post launch. Because one thing that we've noticed actually is as far as you know we've been currently experiencing you guys have had awesome player communication and we're wondering what are the plans post launch and will that persist?

I mean for me personally like my whole reason for starting Intrepid. Was that I wasn't happy how other developments were not to engaged with the community and did not [audio drop] to some of the direction that the community was trying to give them. While I understand that you know there is a creative vision at hand and that creative vision should not necessarily deviate at the whim of a vocal minority, it is important however to take into account what the player base is saying; and, the only way to do that is to be connected with people. So, you know you'll see in our development there are times a couple weeks may come up, 3 weeks might come up where there is less communication than normal but generally our objective is to be as communicative as possible with the community, so you know it's going to be a very active development team because also were self-publishing in North America, we want to make sure that we are there for the community to interact with on a regular basis.

Right, I mean you guys have already seen that and I am throw this in here. They've been incredibly interactive even with us as a fan podcast of the show. I think this is the fourth time Steven that we've interviewed and talk to you on the show. I think it's 4 different times so far, so I mean you can see their dedication to the community, how active they are so I mean that's, they've already been evident of that so far, which has been really cool.

Another thing to take away from that is that you know I understand. I understand why some studios may not have this level of open development because part of open development is the communication process and being present in different communities such as you know Dungeon Crawler Network or other content creators that might be out there is an added difficulty because it does take up time - and especially during the development phase of the game - time is something that really just doesn't exist stuff like this. You know I retired when I was 28 years old only to jump into probably the most time consuming process of my life, which is building this game. Although it is a great passion. It's something I love to do every single day, walking into that studio and getting to work with these amazing veteran developers; but it is something that is a lot of time and having to devote time towards the community can be something that's difficult to do, but I would reiterate this: After the development is complete and we start working on expansions and updates, I foresee there is going to be a great more deal of time for myself and a few other people to interact with the community more so. So that's something to consider as well.

Oh cool, so we can schedule you guys in right now.

[Laughter] No but we really do appreciate you taking the time, you know, like we said earlier that you're taking the time to talk to us and we always of course love it. So, all right now so that you still have some more questions to jump through.

36:42

Yep yep let me jump to the next one. So I heard something interesting that was mentioned kind of within the talks of Ashes and that was players would essentially have the ability to create their own bank and essentially run a business very similar to how the taverns were described and things like that. So what we're curious of is can you elaborate on potential tools that people will be able to use in order to make businesses of their own that they come up with the war anything different like that?

Yeah so, it's not specifically - just a clarification - not specifically a bank per se but different types of businesses such as a tavern or a, excuse me, a auction house or something that's present and in the node, so let's just use the tavern angle. If you own a tavern and you can you could potentially own this business that exists in the city or you could own it on your freehold. Now, what players can do at this tavern is going to be up to you as you manage this building right. There's going to be a UI that's present for you to kind of select different services that are present; and that could be in the form of a specific quest that can only be taken at your location. It could be - and that quest could require some coin in order in order to discover this - say for example you enter into [audio drop] and you know there's NPCs chatting in there and you're walking around and you might need to bribe the bartender for some information. You know, very DnD or pathfinder feely. That would be a coin that you would collect from players and they might be able to find a either random quest; they might be able to purchase a food that you have selected or achieved and this is going to be its own progression, so as you start the tavern - the business - you may have only access to the tier one service, the tier one quests, the tier one meals that grant a specific type of buff for period of time after the player leaves and then as you exist for a longer period of time - because it's difficult to exist for a period of time in a world that's constantly changing -somebody could siege your node and destroy it or destroy your freehold because of it. So the longer you exist that the higher level up you become in that business, the more patrons you serve, the faster you'll be able to level up in that business, granting access to new types of recipes for food that you could then potentially even sell to cooking professions, that could only gain it from a player owned business in a certain area; or a specific question that might only be gathered from the play owned [audio drop]. So there's a lot of things that we want to incorporate in our tavern, in our business owned system, that kind of grants players a meaningful existence in the world and rewards them for their persistence, dedication and survivability.

Alright. I hadn't actually even thought of tavern and businesses leveling up, but yeah, that's an awesome idea.

Thank you. [Laughter] It's always something that I wished, you know like when I would run a lot of a lot of [audio drop] comes from my experience as a GM playing dungeons and dragons campaigns or pathfinder campaigns and there's a lot of versatility as a dungeon master to kind of create your own house rules and systems that exist and let the players explore out those systems, because it gets fun right and part of what I used to do it large campaigns that would exist is I would have a kingdom building you know side arc that people could do in downtime. So like we'd have our play session one night of the week, but then the rest of the week they would be emailing me what their characters doing during down time, you know participating in and the different businesses or ventures. The side evil campaign that some due to the party is hiding his alignment is actually some evil guy. You know there's a lot of things there that I just feel has been left out and is a huge reservoir of play potential that players can experience in graphical render, in a graphical DnD campaign; which is what an MMO really should be from a fantasy perspective is like: it is that graphical representation on a computer where instead of playing with the group you're playing with you know thousands of people across the world and you're experiencing this this really living experience.

Right and I mean jumping in here that's over time we've seen that the MMO industry - and I specifically said it that way for a reason - has been dropping the RPG element from that more like were massively multiplayer online game, I've seen that acronym thrown around because they don't like to the idea of the RPG and they're taking that out.

You know what it's okay for that. It is not necessarily a bad thing for the MMO part of MMORPG to explore different avenues you know. As countries upgrade their connections to different households and the demographic becomes larger and players who have either the resources to own a console slash PC slash whatever and network technology becomes better, accommodating massive players in different game designs, that's all great and good but the problem is innovation has left the MMORPG aspect. I think it's what you're saying is they leave out that RPG elements and what innovation can exist there and the reason why they do that is because it is such an investment from different companies to take the risk of creating an MMORPG that they can't really combat these these large players in this industry, so they don't try. And I think that what Intrepid is doing is trying to illuminate the potential that's present and and provide the players what they should rightfully be receiving.

43:23

And I think part of that comes in if we're getting a little meta here, but I mean part of that also is the changing mindset of players in general: the quick get-in-get-out kind of game play that is so prevalent nowadays, people don't want to invest the time to explore RPG elements. It's like, I don't want to have to develop my character I just want it there. But I feel like personally that's hurting the genre. I understand there is a time and a place for that type of gameplay but I feel like that's been hurting the art MMORPG genre is they've been trying to accommodate that quick get-in-get-out gameplay.

Well I think that when a development is driven by the bottom line, the dollars, that's when it's possible for in their direction to shift to how can we appeal to the largest audience possible? Let us incorporate that into our game design. You know, as opposed to Ashes of Creation accepting the fact that we will not appeal to everyone and that is okay. There is a sufficient number of players that exist in the MMORPG community to create a successful game that appeals to the RPG players out there; and that's what a lot of our systems are geared towards.

Excellent.

The vision statement that you just made with regards to taking a DnD campaign or pathfinder campaign in putting it into the MMO, into the computer. The way you stated it was fantastic. That is going to drive the difference home is that vision, that empathy behind that. You can just hear it in the way you said it.

Thank you, yeah no, I'm a die hard of the traditional - in fact I was toying with the idea of running my Ashes campaign as a weekly Twitch stream with the developers in the office; and giving people an insight to the story that way, but I'm just so concerned about revealing certain aspects of the lore and spoiling it for people, but it is something I'm still toying with.

I think eventually be a great idea. You don't want to give away stuff but absolutely that be in, so I'd watch that one.

That might be a fun DVD documentary at the end you know for super collector's edition. Yeah, there you go, the thought process behind it. Nice. All right Alpha, I think you got-

46:10

Yeah, one tack on question to that is - I got my wife throwing stuff at me. Anyways, I got as a tavern owner will I have the ability to kick people out of my establishment, or let's just say I don't like Empyrean Elves, I think they smell funny, I think they look funny, I don't want them in my store. Can I block them from being in my store or?

I would be leaning towards the answer being no; and the reason why is because there are plenty of mechanics for you to exercise your dislike of another player especially through PvP and we don't want to hard code in divisive systems, such as either excluding movement of a player character into a certain area, such as your Tavern; or banning somebody through that method. I really, I think that the ultimate, I mean the ultimate aspect of an MMO is the fact that you are playing with people you would never meet. You're forming relationships with people you would never have an opportunity to form relations with. You're conquering, cooperating and there's also conflict. I don't want to hard code into the game the ability to divide; and I think that I think that you can remedy your dislike of a player through the existing conflict system.

So I guess that means that if I'm running a node I can't artificially make all the NPC guards have a negative reaction to all Elf characters, because I don't like Elves.

No you can't do that. [Laughter] Again, the idea behind even nodes is that there is no ownership. There is really no ownership. This is a location in the world where anybody can come and start a life or declare their citizenship, right; and yeah there's going to be leadership and that leadership will hold powers that citizens may not hold, in order to develop the node and build certain types of buildings. In fact, they can even declare you know trade partnerships with different nodes. They can declare war on different nodes; and you know, that would be a mechanic where guards would then be set to attack citizens of another node if they come within range, but that would be not a specific race per-se it would be the other citizens of that.

Man I was going to say.

You gotta stop trying the racial wars.

You don't know my dislike of Elven races, so therefore as a leader I therefore would be pushing policies that may not be popular among the Elven kind that's all I'm saying.

Unbelievable.

You can blame Skyrim and the Altmer for that. I really hate elves after that game, so all the Elf hate is ingrained in me now. It's built-in.

49:21

All right, so in a previous episode we were looking at the griefing system, how it works and what we know so far. I had a particular problem with the Sea of Thieves grieving system, so we were questioning say player has a such a pronounced XP loss that they get down to the XP of a level one character, but if they are still level 50 how do they redeem that if they can't get that experience back up, or can they?

So we don't have deleveling, instead what we have is experience debt. Now the more experience debt you accrue, the greater the detriment to your character; not to the point where you can not get out of the debt. There will always be a way forward to remove your your debt, your experience debt. Now, with regards to griefing per-se, you're not going to really, it mean you're not gonna see griefing in the game very often; and that's because our flagging system, the corruption mechanics, are based around disincentivizing a griefer or PKer but still offering the opportunity - should the occasion arise where the benefits outweigh the risk - you have the ability to do so. But, you know, corruption, if you gain corruption, which is killing a non-combatant - a player who is not a fighting back basically - if you gain that corruption your world has changed. It is not going to be a very beneficial place to be and you have the potential of losing your gear. Your combat efficacy decreases based on the amount of corruption you accrue. So you know it is a comfortable balance between player agency and grief and basically; removing player agency for other players.

And for some clarification of that: That is what we're referring to is anti-griefing is would be corruption system, that being in a place of [cross-talk] yes you can excuse me you could kill someone if you want to; and you did say there is a possibility of losing your as a corrupted player correct?

Correct, yes. If you die [audio dropout] you will lose some material, some things you've gathered, materials you may be holding. You will not lose completed items, weapons, armor or jewelry or you know anything that's an actual item. However, if you are corrupt, meaning you have killed a non-combatant player - a person who hasn't flagged for PvP, who hasn't attacked back, you will gain corruption. When you gain that corruption you have the potential of losing your completed items, your weapon, your armor, stuff that is very difficult to achieve; and then the other aspect of that is, that in order to deter basically players taking alternate characters and saying this is my PK alt, the more players you kill, the more corruption you gain, the higher your combat efficacy in PVP diminishes, so to the point where you will deal no [audio dropout]. If you're out there and you killed you know 20 players just for you know fun; and it and they're dead and you've gained that corruption, you will not be able to perform in PVP any longer. You will need to take that character and go work off that corruption. And then additionally, the other aspect of corruption is that if you kill another player who is a non-combatant and the level disparity between you and that player is great, you will gain a higher amount of corruption from that single kill. To the point where you should not be killing a level one character [audio dropout] 50, otherwise that would be the equivalent of killing 10 level 50 characters perhaps.

Right. Good. So for all you guys who listened episode 40, I think it was, or 41 which is our griefing one, there you go, so Steven you can listen to that part. Cool, now and that's what we're referring to as, excuse me, the griefing type system; and I like that, because sometimes, that was something. I played Ultima Online, right. That was the very first MMO you could kill someone. Now obviously there was full gear drop in that game, but as a corrupted player or as a red player you could actually lose skill progression in that game if you died. There were negative repercussions to attacking a karmically good player, or performing any kind of quote unquote evil act. But, there was always that do I risk this, because you know and there were ways to redeem yourself. It's like if I kill the person for whatever reason, I can become good again, I just have to survive long enough to do it. And so there really was that little bit of risk versus reward and sometimes, sometimes you just gotta stab someone when they're really being an awful person. Possibly me.

54:51

[Laughter] Part of my experience and playing MMORPGS I was a very big fan of a game called Lineage 2; and Lineage 2 to have a very similar system in their flagging system. We've incorporated obviously some changes that I think Lineage 2 had issues with. But, generally speaking, you know funny thing, in that game there was just - so it's interesting, like that probably our most memorable moments among the MMOS we've played are the stories that are created by by players; by other players, by our interaction with them.

Emergent gameplay.

Exactly, so one of the interesting things that happened was on my server there were there primary alliances that existed. There is one that I was leading. There is another one [audio dropout] the third; and there was a fight that had broken out at one of the popular hunting [audio dropout] between myself, my party - who were trying to hunt in this area - and one of the leader's parties of the other alliance; and we called in our friends who was the third alliance who took our side and outside of one of the main cities [audio dropout] on there was a probably an 8 hour long fight that existed between about 200 different people, just responding. And now in that game, Lineage 2, and leads to when you died you lost 4 percent of your level and you could be delevel and it was a Korean grindfest because if you were at max level, the time it took you to level up 1 level - at 72 I think at the time was the max level - took you about 4 or 5 days. And I was 72 during the fight and at the end of that 8 hours I had dropped down to 64, so it was torturous. I'm not advocating for [audio dropout] experience, but I will say that it was one of the most memorable and fun experiences I had in a MMO; having those players just fighting nonstop outside of the city, respawning and running back to fight again. But you know the system that was in place in Lineage 2 was a similar flagging system; and you didn't often see PKers. I mean you really didn't because it was difficult to attain the gear and nobody, there was not usually a risk, there was not usually an opportunity that arose that was higher than the risk associated.

Right yeah I mean I've always hated games were you were limited. You know like the system said you cannot attack this player for whatever reason. Like, I mean even in real life if you will there's crimes and punishment for it and I mean sometimes it happens right. Now we're not going into morality here, but there's nothing limiting you as a person from performing a certain action. We look back at history we already know sometimes people got sick and tired of the emperor in Rome, you know, with Commodus there, it would really be annoying if there is a system in place is that you can't kill Commodus, sorry you know even though he's a terrible emperor, so yeah I'm glad that we're sticking with that. I love Roman history so there we go. Alright, let's continue these questions are we only have a couple more left to go Steven, I don't know what your time frame is so?

No no, that's fine couple more's fine.

58:24

All right, so it was mentioned that the game be balanced against group content and not for PVP specifically. What are your thoughts on how sometimes, or excuse me, how something becomes balanced for group content.

I'm sorry, you had broken up there just for a second. Was that second one?

So, on of the questions we have was it was mentioned that the game will be balanced against group content. And not for PvP specifically, what are your thoughts on how something becomes balanced for group content?

Well we are balancing for group content with regards to synergy between classes. We want to the base archetypes to have a role that is beneficial to a diverse group composition. Now that's not to say we're not balancing for PvP, as a matter of fact our first phase of Alpha 1 is very very PVP centric.

59:28

I think the question's more of - I'm sorry the way it was worded - but I think it's more of balancing for PvP on a one for one ratio, like.

Oh one verse one.

Yeah I think that's a better way of wording that question.

We don't want, we're not trying to balance. That is, there will be match ups in 1v1s where one class will be superior to another; and that application should be a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. We want there to be counter-play between the different classes. That's something that's important. We feel it will be beneficial to raid composition, because raids will then not just be able to run a mage ball, you know because those are the ultimate class in the game at the moment and when the game changes the meta [audio dropout] that. Instead what we want is we want, you know, three houses in this in this system where archetypes exist and have a - not necessarily decisive - but do have a advantage over there a counter classes; so because of that we don't really [audio dropout] thing one v ones to that degree. Instead it's going to be a group focused balance, where as long as you have the the diversity of class present that's going to be an equal level playing field. It's going to be very dependent on skill and strategy.

1:01:01

Awesome, I know that always becomes an issue in other games. Especially that focus on like PvP arenas and what not, where you start getting a lot of flack from the vocal minority about A my class socks in this, it's no longer meta; and you start seeing the game change a lot because developers start caving to: oh you're right rogue backstab is over-powered let's nerf that; and then it starts losing its application in other areas where a PvP change is now affecting how it's handled in PvP or PvE, vice versa, you know, you can't when you balance for that one to one it starts making all the classes feel exactly the same anyway.

Yeah and we don't want that. We want a lot of [audio dropout] present in those classes. Now it's important to note however that in our secondary class system, what creates that 64 different classes, you know certain archetypes are capable of moving the gap between their counterpart per-se. If I am a tank archetype and a mage is my counter, I can take a mage secondary and kind of bridge the divide slightly; and then move my identity that direction ever so slightly. And that can that can help, so we want, and players can change that secondary through a process but can change that secondary as well. So, yeah that's really our objective.

1:02:32

So last question I have, that I have is: Will the NDA be lifted for alpha phase one?

There will not be an Alpha 1 NDA. There will not be an Alpha 1 NDA. There will be a test period before Alpha 1, of Alpha 1. It's so funny. There'll be an Alpha for the Alpha 1; and that will include Kickstarter backers at the Braver of Worlds.

Alpha 0.5.

[Laughter.] We do internal testing, we do QA testing, and then eventually we do a soft rollout and that's our that's our Alpha of the Alpha, but it won't be too long; and the Braver of Worlds of players will have the ability to participate in that very early phase of the alpha one phase one. A lot of different phases and pre's and alphas.

Absolutely.

1:03:40

Real quick, do you have any plan for any GM run events, specifically the one that comes to mind is when they shut down the FFXIV servers they actually had a huge server-wide event where they spawned monsters everywhere; and it was symbolic of the destruction of the world before they brought it up again for A Realm Reborn; and there's been many instances of GM kind of spawned events. Any plans to do that in Ashes?

You know, I know why that's fun and I have had fun in events similar to that in other games I've played. As a matter of fact, the time when I felt Archeage was best was during alpha. At the end of that alpha they had GM's you know making people giants and their heads big and running around and doing fun things, but I will say that the, we need to be careful with those types of things, because whenever you inject an outside element to a player created atmosphere, you have an opportunity to direct the course of events on a server; and it's an unfair direction because as GM's we have, you know, we have different appeal than any other player may have on the server so I don't ever want it to be a situation where if the company and our personnel can stay out of this player-created political atmosphere slash world that they're directing, I would like that to be the case. Can we do some fun things? Yes. Will we lead a raid against world boss? No. You know that's what I think you have to find a comfortable balance.

1:05:28

Got it, got it. Makes sense, makes sense. Can you provide any more details on the node system as it relates to the benefits that each kind of has, or will that be coming in the part 3 of the node system.

[Laughter.] Some of that will be coming in the [audio dropout] will be coming on different blogs.

Okay. Nice I like the way you brought that back around the nodes 3. It was, that was classy. We did not work that out ahead of time, so I'm very proud of him for that one. Awesome, so well Steven thank you so much. I think that's the end of our questions, because I see the other ones we have I guess aren't being marked so I don't know for asking those but; and that's fine. So thank you so much Steven we really appreciate your time. Is there anything that you would like to say to the player base?

Yeah, no, I really want to just again I tell you this but we tell you often how much we appreciate at the studios the involvement of not just content creators like yourself, but also that members of Discord, the people on our forums, the evangelists that we have spreading the word for the game. It means so much to my development team personally to see this type of support for really a game that has no pre-existing IP, that has no pre-existing story; that's really only spawned over the past year. It's absolutely incredible and it is all thanks to the community that we have in wanting to move the genre in expressing their hopes for a game that's not just made by a gamer, but takes into account really what this MMORPG community that's so unique in the gaming genre, what we want out of the game; and hopefully it turns the heads of different publishers and different developers so that we can see more of this community driven development.

Absolutely. And a little bit of an aside, I think we're really starting to see that era of the quote unquote Indie MMOs, just due to the fact that there's been so much dissatisfaction with the triple A MMO industry and people wanting to see things different that the big companies and publishers aren't willing to take a risk on; and we really need to see that life being brought back into our genre, because I know Steven has said this. I know I love - I don't even like playing single-player games I feel like I'm wasting time. MMOs are like the love of my gaming life, like it is, they are the things that I tend to put the most amount of effort into because I love the sense of community. I love the sense of a living breathing world that continues, even when I'm not logged in to drive it along; and I'm just so excited for what Ashes is gonna you know do you; and again Steven thank you so much we really appreciate you coming on. I want to take my co hosts Storms and Alpha soul as well. You guys did great with the questions and also for the community for listening to the show and coming back each and every week. We really appreciate that. So thank you so much and we will see you next time on From the Ashes.