Talk:2020-07-18 Steven Sharif Interview - Summit1G and Shroud

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Shroud's playing hard to get i just don't think he has the channel open anymore okay now i should go get him in all right i think this works hello ah cool cool cool uh we just need to see if we can hear steven hello can you hear me yeah yeah hey how's it going my friend what's up so what is this what is this i'm looking at this youtube video i think that's a pretty awesome info dub dump that i saw peon do this morning it's uh pretty comprehensive gives a a good look i think of a lot of the systems and mechanics in the game is that the first time you saw the video uh no i saw it when it dropped like 20 minutes after dropped i think on pacific coast so so you uh so you appreciate his video oh yeah i thought he did a pretty good job of concisely kind of explaining a lot of the systems and mechanics and kind of philosophies i guess of the of the development did you have the chance to talk to him like before he did the video honestly i i didn't i didn't talk with him at all i know that he interacted with a lot of the the community members who um set up you know kind of the community driven wiki uh Shaze and Lex uh who kind of transcribed the live streams of what not so hit i know he used that as a great source material when he was checking you know fact checking some of his information is there anything like uh in that video that you would have touched based on a little bit more um you know i think i i think so before i started intrepid right and before i began the project which has now been about five years ago i mean i've been playing mmos since i was seven years old back in like 1992 i played my first one was neverwinter when it was six dollars by the hour on aol to play right um and uh you know i never knew about that yeah that was the thing that was a thing um but you know i think what i probably would have touched on is is you know patience is necessary when building a game of this size i mean the thing is is part of my french it's fucking huge it is a huge game there's a lot of systems a lot of mechanics um and it takes a lot of people to to create it so it's it's it's understandable there's a lot of skepticism behind like whether or not we can pull it off but i think as we approach you know the alphas and the betas that we're we're getting into now i think people are finally seeing you know in the gameplay that we dropped just last month which was two hours of unedited 4k footage they're starting to see a lot of these systems come alive and you know for me my main motivating factor in in building this team to create this this game has been that i as an mmo player was simply just fed up with what i was eating by these companies uh okay and i wanted to create something that i think would resonate with a lot of people those are the best kinds of games i mean they want a game that you want to make because yeah it's an avid player in a certain genre and they're just tired of it like game after game yes just garbage and then you're you know what i'm going to do it better exactly yeah i never understood it too because you'd imagine that a lot of these games right are headed or take input from serious gamers that are mmorpg fanatics and they tell them like hey you know don't destabilize the player driven economy by adding something to the micro transaction shop or you know hey players don't want to see you know everybody win a reward or not have to spend any time or dedication uh risk versus reward components right like you would think that they would have focus groups that would tell them these things but they either you know either that doesn't affect their bottom line the way they want to or you know they are just missing the mark because they're not driven by gamers they're getting told all the wrong stuff someone's telling them the wrong information on what makes a good game i guess that's what that's what the intriguing thing is it's all the ideas that this game has right it's like even just like the simplest thing of having open world pvp is so huge to me is crazy you know and the idea and the in the the punishment system um the idea that you can even drop loot uh if you are in that what does that state uh called corrupt yeah corruption that's like a legion yeah one of my favorite mmos was lineage ii did a in my opinion a great job in balancing the player agency to kill anybody anywhere right because it was a non-faction based game but it had a downside right it was it was a risk versus reward scenario the reward was you got to kill the person the risk was now you're corrupt you know you can drop your items this is a conscious decision that you as a player have to make and there are consequences i you know that type of consequence driven interaction is important i think but at the same time on the flip side you can't just be entirely pvp minded as a game right you have to provide players with many different progression paths that they can you know enjoy their time in the game with so having an in-depth and meaningful you know artisan or crafting system uh with some serious competitive rating pve content as well as having those pvp systems creates a really healthy population uh so that all sides are kind of satisfied absolutely i agree i agree everybody kind of needs each other yeah you know that's that's the thing is like you know when as we're as we're building this stuff you know as a game and not a lot of games show early development like this because it's a it's a two-sided sword like on one end you have the benefit of you know players like yourself and the communities that you guys represent have an opportunity to watch things give feedback and kind of express their opinions on things and that's great because the iteration process that us as developers go through we can take that into account and make sure that we're not steering the ship incorrectly right and that we don't end up three months out from our open beta and we have to delay by a year or two because there are systems in place that the community doesn't like but on the flip side of that you have to also understand you know the other side of the sword is that this is an active development and development of games is not pretty it is a it is a crazy process something i had no idea about you know over five years ago but when i pulled people over from sony online entertainment or from blizzard you know these these great developers that aren't responsible sometimes for the decisions that the companies make but they are amazing all-star developers you know they come on board and they've taught me a whole new world it's like i believe it i believe it yeah especially in mmo i mean if you have no prior experience and uh like uh being a head on any video games or anything like having any ideas on them or stuff or do you i i'm sorry so you cut out for me that one second what was that do you have any prior experience in the video game world uh besides just playing so your big big first thing is like this huge mmo project you know okay so it's a really funny story right because um when i was playing i was playing a game called archage and i was really like in love with the potential that arcade had in it and it just got so undermined by in my opinion really bad design choices absolutely um and it kind of that's what you know i was retired at the time i was like i was 28 29 i'm i was 29 i'm 35 right now um but i was 29 and i was playing this game and i was i was so pissed at the design decision the choices and the like recent updates it just kept deteriorating my community and my guild members were quitting the game and i i finally was at a point where i was just like you know i don't want to play anymore if my friends are quitting this game so i was thinking to myself you know ah man i'm connected with these developers here in san diego who work at sony online and work at other you know studios and whatnot and i used to play a lot of tabletop games with them i used to play like warhammer fantasy even 40k and shit so i was asking i was like hey you guys you're like the lead programmer on planetside 2 right and you've you've built like everquest and you worked on blizzard and on wow and so i was like let's get together and make a game make an mmo it's like i'll fund the thing well i got these great design ideas you know and i'm pulling i'm pulling inspiration from all the mmos that i've played in the past let's build this thing so we spent like that was 2015 we spent the first couple of years just kind of like white papering out all of the designs you know the design ideas that i had for for ashes and then really we started you know we had about 13 15 people uh when we went to kickstarter in 2017 and really kickstarter wasn't a means to to fund the project it was more along the lines of like adding additional features but also getting a litmus test of the community like hey you know i know i think this would be a great game but like do you think these ideas are good and we had an overwhelming you know yeah i remember that it was crazy yeah so that's when we really ramped up and started adding a shit ton of developers to the project that's crazy and with the good ideas oh man i can i like the ideas the node system's crazy shroud thinks shroud thinks eventually the meta will will take over and all the nodes will be a thing but that's that's a that's an interesting thought because um you know when i was coming up with this node system the none of these ideas are revolutionary it's not like the the technology hasn't been present for them to be incorporated into game design right it's not like we're trying to build you know everquest next where you have these you know these uh these fractal structures all throughout the world that just aren't possible they just simply haven't been thought about so exactly they haven't been brought in together so when we're thinking about like node infrastructure basically the node structure throughout the world the the way that the algorithm kind of expands the the territories takes into account a few things one it takes into account the coast like where's the closest coast two it takes into account like the neighboring nodes so it can take over and essentially vassal state those nodes but what's more important is essentially the initial population based on like how players choose their races because we have nine different races and four different starting points that branch out each server's population density is going to dictate essentially the first few nodes that are that are highly populated and then that initial seed is what's going to determine the the node structure as it moves inland into the into the world essentially and based on like the performance and successes of different sieges will determine uh which nodes that got locked out from the previous the initial advancements what nodes can now be available to advance further so i really think that with so many variables that are present in the equation of how nodes advance and stay existing with the more variables you have the higher likelihood there is for there to be a significant diversion in world progression okay do you ever see do you ever see a world in which node progression is going too fast and you know you get to like maybe it's not tested properly or whatever happens right and it gets all the nodes get filled up to max way too quickly or relatively high is there ever a world where you guys would consider wiping or decreasing or you just let the game play out at that point you know well we so okay that's a very good question um first first things first is the way that nodes collect significant amount of experience from their zones of influence and then plugs that into the threshold system that essentially determines when nodes advance to the next stage that algorithm takes into account the average heat mapping of players in the surrounding area over a set period of time that we determine so we can determine that heat map as the past week or the past month or whatever and that can change a little bit of the dials additionally you know one important component of how nodes um you know essentially take into account their advancement and whether or not we would want to change them there's not going to be a time where we would come in and essentially wipe the server the only time that that would be you know possible is essentially if servers need to merge and then we would have a parent server that's determined uh and and the sub servers that get uh wiped and merged into the parent server so that's really going to be dependent on whether or not servers experience any like downfall in population but we're going to be very cognizant on the launch day to not over populate the server selection in a way that creates the likelihood of servers having to be merged um you know that's kind of you know one of the things we have to be very vigilant about okay and since well i saw that like in the in the video that it was like 8 000 to 10 000 people per right server give or take yeah is there going to be a world in which it's going to be kind of challenging to play with your friends because you can't get on a server because it's full you know like imagine a streamer server it's going to be freaking bonkers right right and that's that's part of the equation of essentially watching to make sure that we don't over populate the server selection but at the same time making sure that there's not a queue system in place that's so long not it's detrimental to the concurrency and the player's will to play so to speak it's a tough balancing act a lot of a lot of companies that that are mmo companies they don't get it right um and uh you know it it just takes some finesse it takes some finesse and we have to watch it and see what what's happening at that time but there will be a cue system in place and and if we were to err on the side of longer queues versus versus more server selection options we're going to err on the side of longer queues because it's a greater destabilization to the game if servers have to merge because those are whole populations and that eight to ten thousand mark that's the eight to ten thousand concurrency right so essentially you're going to have still you know around 50 000 accounts that are allowed to register characters on a server select um and then hope that that concurrency doesn't go too high gotcha gotcha i have a question how's gear going to work in this game how like is there going to be like pvp benefit ones from like battlegrounds uh pve gear from raids or dungeons and will they correlate together and work together or would it be more like this your pve set this year so we're not really going to have a sense of pvp versus pve sense they're they're all universal in their stat progression for both instances of pve versus pvp just from a balancing sense that makes most sense to us there will be pvp specific benefits that you can apply through a socketing system into gear and those types of benefits are acquired based on performance in certain pvp related events so for example guilds can progress in levels and based off of your gills stats and and wars that you've completed as well as your individual stats in those wars will determine your ability to purchase guild specific uh uh enchantment stones that can then be applied temporarily to your gear and have pvp-focused benefits a same is true for arena based system where you can join in different types of either solo arenas or 3v3s or 5v5s and based on your performance in the arena leadership ladder at the end of the month will determine your type of benefits that you can acquire that will be time limited so you know it's not as though you're going to necessarily acquire these once and then you're set for your pvp enchantments but instead you'll have to continually perform month after month in order to uh to keep having those slotted enchantments gotcha damn okay and then same is true for the node wars as well as uh the castle siege events also the uh the the caravan system that is you know utilized for transiting goods from region to region uh that carr those caravan events you can participate either as a highway brigade brigand or as a defender in each of those paths will have unique enchantment stones for pve that are determined by your performance in a given period of time in either helping caravans complete their mission or attacking them and looting them for a portion of their goods interesting okay i do like the characters or the performance of the enchants do you mean like there's eventually going to be something like that is there gonna be a cap or if you perform you know even better than you did one time and you did the best last time would it be would the enchant go higher you know what i'm saying right so there's a score that gets reset in a season and the season consists of multiple months right so from from your first month you could potentially max out your contribution and get the best stones available in that method but then as you go into month two and month three and month four your score becomes cumulative and that achievement you'll have an achievement rank as well as a purchasing power the achievement rank will unlock other stones until the season resets season as in the weekly seasons is what you're talking about no so there's there's uh initially they're gonna be six month seasons um and then over that six-month period of time you'll have a cumulative score that unlocks what applicable enhancements you'll have access to based on the certain systems so whether that be the arena system whether it be the guild wars system or the caravan highway quest system that's another world i didn't even talk about yeah i can't imagine how many more things there are in the back end that we have no idea let's just say let's just say the uh the game design document is very very very large i believe it hmm i'm trying to think of what other questions i got but yeah i didn't did i hear 40 man 40 man raids yeah the uh the encounters for world bosses and um uh some of the sieges they're intended to be 40 man raid sizes so five groups of eight and our group sizes are eight what's the best mmo that you have played that's kind of that you look back on you're like damn this the cinema was the most fun i've had in mmorpg dark fall dark fall really isn't that full loot drop yeah yeah i mean it was like a sandbox you know like sandbox scene rusty it was literally like yeah like russ like you'd have your own crafters that would build you know your siege gear your leveling gear and if you were both yeah you would you if you were ballsy you'd bring out like bigger gear just to quest and do random bullshit but there's always a chance that a group will kill you and you lose it all it was very very punishing almost unpunishing but it was hardcore but it's very memorable you know that's what i liked about it it's very memorable yeah okay besides like wow classic but oh obviously wow vanilla um but uh i mean i've played little things like you know i played a little ragnarok online i like some little things from from some certain dabbled in you know in lineage 2 show like that but i've i've never got an end game on those games and the only game i've ever played end game on was wow vanilla so i don't know feels bad man but uh i wish i could go back in time i've changed a lot of that but too much counter-strike yeah that was always the big one i remember when i was playing cs2 like you'd be on a team and whether you were callow cal i am they would always tell you to stay away from wow because there's always the people who play wow and they used to be so good at cs they'd come back and they were garbage you know like complexity back then is rough you know we were too focused on cs yeah but no i never really got i never really got into wow because i i really was at that time like 2003 circa i was playing lineage 2 a lot and the faction based system didn't appeal to me as much i felt i felt like when i when i was playing wow that i was kind of like told who my friends and enemies were and oftentimes like the people on my own faction were the people you know that i did dislike the most you wanted to kill them exactly that's why i liked i liked lineage too because uh you know that was more of a guilt-driven system it was non-faction based uh so you could you know it was really up to you to determine your friends and enemies gotcha yeah i like that i like the idea of being able to kill i want to i like to when i played tara when i played bdo just being able to smack somebody whenever i wanted was nice um got into some of my my my favorite thing about an mmo is not even my favorite thing but one of the greatest things about an mmo was leveling and while leveling being able to pvp and kill people randomly while they're leveling because it like gives me something else to do besides just the mindless grind you know what i mean like oh i'm gonna go kill that guy real quick wow vanilla stb yeah that was that was part i mean honestly what you just described was part of the best like monotony breaker that grinding was like if you had to worry about yours your area that you're farming and being contested like that that was fun if somebody tried to jump out of the bush and gank your ass and you had to like stay on your toes you know and that dude would keep coming back or you would have to die and run back and it was just like this like emotional rollercoaster of anger and like success that was the fun part just be a reminder that uh that fuck man this is badass you know i mean so sometimes you're just grinding you get uh you know you just get into this autopilot mode you're not having as much fun as you would like but when you're just you just randomly getting some pvp session it's just like a reminder like hell yeah dude this is sick that's why i play this you know what i mean oh yeah but yeah i yeah i'm a huge fan of well i've never even thought about like being a fan of no faction until you kind of put it like that but um because i you know wow i was always down just to kill a bunch of alliance dudes oh yeah well if you think about it if you think if you think about it if you don't have a faction in place you have like an ashes you have a lot of pseudo-factions you have nodes that you're a citizen of right and nodes can declare war on each other so your citizen groups become essentially enemies or they can forge alliances where you you you know help defend their their nodes or participate in trade runs and shit or you can have guilds that are pseudofactions where you can declare war on other guilds or you can form alliances in that regard you know you have societies and organizations so you have like a thieves guild or scholars academy and in ashes when you join one of those societies you can climb the ladder in the ranking system and title system within those societies organizations and as you do so you can unlock access to different you know either shops to purchase from or even augments for your skills uh roles within sieges that you can play uh and then you have like quest lines that make you an adversary if you're in the let's say the scholars academy uh there are quest lines that make you go try to steal something from the thieves guild or try to essentially assault another girl so kind of creating these factions takes the place where we we present the player with these soft friction events and then that determines who your friends and your foes are interesting okay and that could be temporarily too right correct yeah and i mean that's that's part of the ebb and flow of yeah exactly i mean in the games i've played right a lot of times servers become a little two-sided if they don't have factions they become two-sided in the sense where you know you have this like struggle against a a group of people that you don't like for a period of time and you fight each other whatever lineage 2 is a lot like that but things can change i mean it all depends on on what's happening right if there's like a a common enemy or c or a castle you want to take or you forge some backroom deal or alliance with the leaders like having that flexibility to to be driven by the players that is fun yeah for sure no it sounds like a pretty cool system how much of the um is playable early you know because there's i'm assuming there's stuff you could only do at max or is it all achievable and you can all you know do it and it scales like most games is there scaling yes yeah so there's not scaling i'm not a fan of of scale i'm not either i'm not even i think i think it it diminishes you know that that advancement feeling that you get when you like can go kill that red monster that you couldn't before you know or this dungeon is untouchable until your best in slot or something um but the the on on the on the side of essentially like end game material there's a lot of different progression paths right it's not just all about your adventuring class so to speak and maxing the level there um on the artisan front there's like three different types of there's three different trees that exist in the artisanship family there's gathering processing crafting you know crafting's really dependent on the advancement of nodes processing is really dependent on the infrastructure you set up on your freehold system so like building the processing uh blueprints and getting materials to build that up and the gathering is really focused around tool creation your ability to like gather higher grade items or to transit the raw materials from region to region gives you a very star wars galaxy-esque type of uh grade system would you say that like there's going to be almost like it almost like reminded me of like life skilling in bdo is there just going to be people that like commit their times like uh stuff like this and uh in the early days and if people so you know so it's funny because i think there's a couple of streams ago i had a question about like what would you say the best course to take as a guild is at the start of a server for ashes and the answer that i gave there was like it really depends on what your objectives and goals are um so will there be people no lifeing you know these systems within nodes i'm i'm 100 positive there is like when i used to play um archeage you know five six years ago you know we had people we had a wide tent guild so we weren't like pvp specifically focused but we had pvp players so we kind of like partitioned them off into a section of the guild where they just did pvp things then we had people who wanted to manage like all the guild lands and do the farms and crop rotations and do the crafting and all that kind of stuff right so in that similar sense you know in ashes there's a lot of different like i said progression paths if you want to focus on the crafting side you can if you want to focus on on the citizenship citizenship side and the your advancement within those societies or organizations you can if you want to focus on building the guild levels so that you have greater passive skills that you can allocate to your guild members or that you have access to better guild shops you can um well that leads me to another question then how is uh how is um gear going to work when it comes to bind on account when it comes to auction house stuff and how uh is gold or your money system is going to be like because there's some some mmos where money is king and there's some mmos where money is just like luxury you know what i mean is it gonna play a big part in end game yeah so money will play a big part in the in-game however with that being said there are um uh organizational specific currencies uh that can't be traded so there is like a general gold that will be will be very important end game but then there's also your progression within certain religions societies or nodes will also have in this funny if any but if any ash's community members are listening they're there's probably new info for them but there will be uh progression-based currencies as well the other thing about the game that's a little bit different is monsters don't drop gold per se they drop essentially what are uh hunting certificates and these certificates can drop on your character's death a portion of them will drop on your character's death so and you can accrue enough and you can move those certificates and and trade them to a uh a hunter npc that exists in the node systems throughout the world but if you move the certificates through the caravan from to a further distant node you can get a higher return on those certificates and you can also store those certificates within your warehouse that exists within a node and if the node gets sacked during that time a portion of those certificates will be lost and looted by the attacks oh so that's like if you have a house in the place that like in a city that gets attacked and torn down you can lose a portion of your stuff correct yeah so essentially raw goods and processed goods materials and raw gatherables those are at risk on your character as well as in um in warehouses so it's it's very important for the citizens to to forge relationships and allie alliances so that if they do get sieged that they can uh defend that those goods and when a siege gets declared the warehouse system for gatherables and materials become locked so you can't just go and you know rip everything out after siege is declared so it sounds like this game is very very very encouraged of like group play or whether you are a solo player and you need assistance you got to you know vocally talk to people so does that mean if you are somebody that hates people okay and you want to play by yourself is it going to suck you know what i mean so that's a that's a i mean that's a good question right mmorpgs are by nature multiplayer and they require some in my opinion they should require some sort of interaction with your community now it doesn't have to be social you don't have to be friends with those people you don't have to work with them you can still solo play right but there are going to be many systems that exist in ashes where you become a part of some type of group so just from the sheer fact that you will want to be a citizen at some node and you can only ever be a citizen at one node right there will be a cooldown period if you renounce your citizenship but when you become a citizen of onenote you're going to now participate in that citizenship specific chat you're going to be a member of a small community and you can still solo play but you're going to be a part of that small pseudo faction so you're forced to do a community no matter what i like it personally because like you're right mmorpgs are about you know the amount of socialize as long as you ease them into a community it sounds like that's kind of easing them in that's not like forcing it over there so it's as long as you ease it in they'll start to like it i think so i have a question now um regarding combat um you say that you've gotten you know some developers over there from like blizzard from soe stuff like that have you gotten anybody over there who's you know fairly notable in pvp like mmo games who and and how did they feel or if you do you know or how does one feel about the combat in your current game when it comes to pvp pve because the tab system versus the uh the combat system or the full action you know yeah so one of the things i was saying earlier about how open development is a as a double-edged sword combat is the most is the most important system to get right in a game and the reason why is because it's the most tactile and interacted with system that the player will experience in the game it is something that you're doing almost constantly right in order to progress along either certain quest lines or just a venturing class you know uh pvp interaction whatever everything you do in some way shape or form you know will come back essentially to that combat system so in an open development right the best way to achieve a good combat system is through constant testing and iteration you know there was a lot of a lot of controversy around our um apocalypse mode which really was born out of the fact that we wanted to get combat right and because we're going for a hybrid-based system that utilizes both uh projectile hit scan ray tracing the everything that goes into essentially making a good action-based system which is something that is difficult to blend into a tab targeted system the hybrid type of you know goal we have for ashes of creation we wanted to make sure that we got it right so what you're seeing in some of this gameplay like uh the um the 4k footage we put out last month right that's like the first step iteration towards our hybrid system and the idea is that players will have skill points they can take those skill points they can allocate them into their skill tree and they can choose to be predominantly action based or tab targeting based now tab targeting and action have very different speeds tempos right so the difficulty in making a hybrid system is finding the right tempo between the two and making sure that we house the cc systems the crowd control abilities within certain types of tab targeting or action-based skills so that they can't be abused when you combine that with a system that uh is essentially oh god i can't think of the top of my head but is essentially the mitigating returns that you have for cc effects then you need to to blend those things together so what people are seeing early on is going to be that first iteration as we continue forward we blend it further we iterate on it more and it becomes a little bit a little bit better but we are fully aware that from a combat standpoint that is the most important thing to get right and yeah we have a lot of devs with great experience on combat systems i mean we have a lot of devs from planetside one and two we have a lot of everquest we have a lot of devs from um you know uh uh star wars galaxies dc universe um you know a lot of people the vast majority of our people come from mmorpg development and they have you know 20-year histories in creating these games should you guys like when you hire someone you do you give these guys like the like uh like a test they have to answer all these questions right like yo what kind of mmo you like do you like pvp or do you like pv you know like are you a guy that only does this or you know what i mean do you you give him the run so i i've actually i think i've gotten a little bit of a of a reputation among my studio as you know the way our our hiring structure works initially as you know and so funny actually us is because we just launched our next hiring phase we we put up about 24 positions to add to our already over 60 plus in-house developers thanks um but the our application process is actually you know people apply they send in the resume cover letter right they get uh filtered based off of the necessary requirements and experience first and then they get sent to the first stage kind of interview where one of the leads of the appropriate departments will interview them then they're given a test for that position so it could be a design test could be an arc test could be an engineering code test and then based off of the results of that of that test they'll go to a second interview stage and then at the second interview stage i will get a write up that's essentially a review where on 1 through 10 we'll go through different you know points of the of the applicant and then if the recommendation is to hire i'll have a final interview with them usually my interview with them revolves around what's your passions why are you in the gaming industry what type of games did you play what kind of those did you like best what did you like about you know these types of things so i can gauge their commitment level as a developer on the project because as part of like forming a good culture that is a game made by gamers you know you want to make sure that people have the relevant knowledge and experience that they can relate to when they're building systems designs characters whatever on Ashes of Creation and if they don't have that then you're missing a little bit of a spark there and you know i think that's important that's why i have pretty dedicated you know developers at the studio i feel like the name of this game finally like comes together now that i've seen like some of the stuff on it you know i mean Ashes of Creation you're like the whole freaking player base is just creating it you know oh yeah iq name shit [Laughter] that's a good observation that's good i like that yeah big steps uh that's it's pretty crazy uh systems that you guys have in mind you know what i mean to to show the world very freaking interesting and if it's got uh the lazy peon interested it's also interesting because that guy plays mmos you know oh yeah but yeah i know i mean we appreciate you know people following along the great thing about the game is that you know there's no pay-to-win structure whatever whatsoever in the game so like if people want to just keep watching and give their input that's what we suggest people to do right you don't have to buy a package you don't have to be an alpha and beta there's no box price to the game it's only going to be subscription based so there's a very low barrier to entry as well and you know people just watching along giving their input that's what that's what we enjoy as developers because every piece of you know response we get from a community is important i have another question yeah coming from an mmo gamer to an mmo developer do you think that you could after watching this for the last five years step by step by step by step still enjoy the game to its fullest extent um not like you would have you think you know it's probably not it's it's probably not possible the one thing i would say is this there's there's there's two elements to playing an mmo in my experience there's on the on the one side there's the achievement and progression element where you go through the story you discover cool things you explore the world you know you get your levels up and you unlock new abilities and you know that type of new experience is always gratifying it has a good dopamine kind of response to it right i don't think i'll ever be able to yeah i don't think i'll ever be able to experience that and enjoy it because you know i'm very integral in in every component of you know creating the experience on that front but on the second on the flip side of that coin there's the the player driven experience and there's the friendships that are forged and there's the enemies that are you know created and there is the achievements of taking you know castles from a guild or you know being the best in in your performance for a raid or you know whatever on that front i think i will be able to enjoy the game yeah there's a lot of unknown until the community makes something of it exactly and that's that's the excitement right there so you have you know everything about the game you've been working on it for years you lost that yes but there's going to be so many things that are forged from the community because of how the game is made absolutely that's going to be the excitement for you okay yes that is absolutely right you think you'll be able to you think you'll be able to go into boss fights and just dick them because you know all their animations you know exactly no i don't really want to participate in the game in that sense right okay i guess i i i feel like i will participate in the game and kind of what shroud was explaining you know i'll have that mystery of whatever the players as a community kind of you know set as an as an experience as an environment uh you're gonna be chilling with that for sure you're gonna be casual oh yeah that's cool man okay i like that he come with the property yeah okay i'm trying to think of anything else i really really really like that i can kill anybody whenever i want to i yeah i that is humongous from everything i think well he has no choice so the way it works is the way it works is players will exist out in the open uh and they will be in a non-combatant state right so they'll have a normal name color you know it'll be it'll be green uh if you roll up and you see somebody and you want to attack them you can attack them right and your your name will now change to a purple color you'll flag essentially now what this does is it lets anybody attack you and they'll flag as well they'll become a combatant right and if anybody dies while they're flagged there's no harm done you actually lose less from an experience standpoint you drop less material and gatherables not not your items not completed items um so it encourages reciprocation in fighting right before we move on you're telling me you kill people they can drop just like little potions and stuff even if they're a combination yeah potion is a potion is a completed item so the only thing you could drop you'll drop a portion of is your gathered resources so those are like plants and rocks or stone or gems and stuff like that that you have yet to put into your warehouse uh and then or your processed goods so essentially a process good is let's say i take that you know that iron or that mithril and i go create uh with my freehold i put it into my smelter and i create you know these ingots of those which are then able to be used uh alongside recipes for crafting certain things okay right so you can drop a lesser portion of the materials and a greater portion of the gatherable raw gatherables it's kind of like rust or like like war z you have to kind of like make it back to town safe and get all your stuff back into your spot exactly however this is what i would say so when you attack another person in flag and they fight you back right no corruption can be gained from that that's that's consensual pvp people are engaging that but if the person does not fight back and you continue to attack them and you kill them without them having flagged at that point you gain corruption and corruption is a stat that accrues depending on two things one the number of previous kills you have pks where people didn't fight back and two the level uh difference between you and the target that you killed right so if you kill a much lower level person you're gonna gain much more corruption now corruption has a few effects on a player one if you have corruption you now have the ability to drop completed gear that you're wearing if you die okay so there's a small percentage chance that when you die you'll drop like let's say your gloves or uh a lesser chance of dropping your weapon right yeah um and then uh what happens as well is the death penalties that happen from a normal death get quadrupled if you're corrupt and you die so there is experience debt that can be gained from death and you'll gain four times that experience debt if you die while corrupt additionally your location as a corrupt player is broadcast to the bounty hunters of the world so there are four different node types of which of which one is a military node type the military node type comes with a bounty hunter system that players can opt into and progress in while they're a bounty hunter they see the location of corrupt players in the world and they can chase them down and fight and then there are benefits for the corrupt player and or the bounty hunter based off of their success in killing one another and the corrupt player doesn't gain more corruption for killing bounty hunters bounty hunters are always flagged to corrupt players dude that's so cool that's almost like people will be able to make their money just being mercenaries in your game dude just right so so yeah the flagging system actually really discourages griefing in the sense of pking players so in lineage two like you know let me just have a very similar system called karma um and uh you know karma didn't have some of these components to them but uh you rarely saw in lineage two people going red i mean it happened right but it wasn't all the time it wasn't super prevalent you didn't go out of town each day and worry about getting pk'd um so you know in that sense uh you know we put a little bit more safety nets here to kind of discourage griefing and encourage consensual pvp right those death penalty penalties get halved you lose less items if you fight back you know these are these are uh some of the systems in place to kind of encourage that that's freaking cool it's so fun yeah corruption can be cleared in two ways corruption either is cleared by dying so whenever you die you're going to lose a portion of that corruption that's the bit right okay that's the bitch way and then the second way is if you have a group of friends or you go and you find a spot where you can evade the bounty hunters for a period of time you can gain experience and gaining experience will slowly decrease your corruption score hell yeah so you grind it out right and that creates a fun kind of experience for the bounty hunters to try to catch you while you're working it off i like it so what's the so what's the the gain there of even taking the risk to grief somebody get materials so let's say yeah so i mean there's there's a couple of reasons why this is this mechanic you know to allow that pk to exist is important one as we know in non-faction-based games you make enemies and you make friends and sometimes your hatred for your enemies is so great that you just want to kill them whenever you see them regardless of the consequences right it doesn't even matter to me that i'm gonna potentially lose my gear if i if i can't stand this person so much or you know they've done something wrong you know i want to go and kill them providing that freedom as long as you're aware of the cost-benefit ratio is important to player agency in my opinion right that's one method the the second reason why it might be important is there are very rare unique spawns of gatherable goods that exist within the world and you may see a person who's gathering it right and you may want to to kill them to get a portion of the gatherable good that they got and then actually i guess there's a third reason the third reason would be some hunting grounds are prime hunting grounds so it may take you an hour to get inside this open world dungeon and get down to like the heart of this dungeon that has the best grinding room for your group and you've made it down you spent the hour to get yourself down there and another group shows up 30 minutes later or there's a group there and you're like oh fuck these guys yeah that's what i'm talking about that's exactly what i'm talking about oh that's cool okay question have you ever um is the world gonna feel really big i know like you can talk about how big a world is all day but it also matters like the speed of your character how big you are and is it gonna feel real like spacey kind of like wow i noticed that in eso i feel like it's the opposite i feel like i'm always on a road and i'm never out in like some random area would you guys say that your your maps are pretty open yeah the maps are very open actually if uh if you know we've had some some pre-alpha testing leading up to the alpha one testing we're gonna have at the end of this year and uh some of our testers you know they've been kind of going through one one of these dungeons on what we call our alpha island um is massive i mean it's it's huge like just just from a sheer sk i'm not talking like uh surface area i'm talking like height width you know everything you're in inside this giant you know dungeon and i think that type of of monolithic you know experiences when you're entering certain areas contributes to that ah immersive feeling absolutely um and you don't want to see everything that's tiny and small um you know that's not that's not as grand yeah yeah right i just like sometimes mmos just cannot quite grasp like getting me this huge world adventure feel and it doesn't always people have a hard time doing that so it was that's it's a big thing that not a lot of people think about to be honest yeah i feel like most games they they start with it and the grand feeling is there but then over time they casual it up and then they introduce like wow flying for example and it just eliminated wow everything yes he also has that yes so like yeah my question my next question there is that you said that there's or the video said that there's only like you know like 10 or so people on the whole server that have flying mounts does that mean 10 or so people but he said temporarily too am i wrong that i heard that well yeah it is temporary so there's three methods by which people can attain uh the flying amounts one is your guild leader of a guild that owns a castle right there's five guild they're five five castles out there uh guild leaders have the benefit that they can well boys we're making a guilt giant you know dragon orders i expect all of you to join which each have people get during sieges so they'll have massive aoe effects they'll have the ability to kind of fly around the battleground and stuff uh straight up like leader like oh yeah like a huge ass dragon and then uh the second group of people that can acquire these large flying mounds are mares of metropolises and metropolis are the highest stage of no development you can achieve there can only ever be five metropolises on a server at a given time without they don't have to be destroyed um so those are that's ten right there and those are temporary so like mayor gets elected guild leaders can be you know supplanted whatever um or taken out by other guilds who take the castle so those are temporary then in addition to that um legendary bosses will drop these royal map they're called royal mounts legendary bosses will drop eggs and these eggs can be cultivated through the animal husbandry system uh essentially through uh a certain quest line that exists within the animal husbandry system if you have a high enough stable upgrade on your on your uh freehold oh i love it i just i just love all these requirements keep getting keep doing requirements i love it they can be cultivated into a lifetime specific flying mount so once it gets to a grown stage you'll have a 30 day between between a 15 to 30 day lifetime on the mount and that and that variable is determined by the efficacy of your animal husbandry skill um so the higher more proficient you are in that or the person you find who's proficient in that can raise the animal uh and then uh you will have a a a wrapped essentially uh a lifetime on it you can imagine having a fine you also have a time requirement to hatch the egg no so essentially the uh the egg does not have a lifetime on it so you can hold it for a period of time uh or actually maybe you know he's on a dragon right now he's riding around a dragon that's funny yeah that was good timing uh i'm not sure actually i don't remember i have to check that i should check what i wrote on the in the gdp did you remember that maybe it does have a time frame but it's an ample time frame um and then additionally once the raising is complete the item comes into your inventory as a mount would uh and it's in a wrapped state which means the timer's not ticking until you first use it and then when you first use it the timer ticks okay so wait wait the timer ticks as in like when it hatches oh it's light once you have yes once you hatch it right that that mount now has a lifetime that's right you are the game that are you the game that your character gets old and shit was i hearing that no no no that's that's that's a different that's that's an okay okay so i was thinking like you're dragging out a lifetime dude okay so yeah my guy's not gonna die randomly when he's like 80. that's good okay is that online and offline time what game is that that's that's online and offline time okay yeah does it so does that mean so it's not like very i'm already that game got canceled my question is like how many people are actually gonna have flying mounts does that mean people could constantly farm it so that like there won't only be ten people flying out so it might be a hundred a thousand because people are grinding around and grinding trying to get the eggs so it because okay now you remind me my question is the egg is pretty rare so it's only gonna come from certain legendary world bosses so in that regard and then there's a chance only to drop it um so it's gonna be rare in that sense and then yes that's a very good question trout so that reminds me there is a lifetime on the hatching uh process and there is a lifetime on the uh ability to open the the wrapped item essentially um and start that lifetimer so at any given point in time you're gonna see anywhere from 10 to maybe at max i would say around 20 based off of the world the legendary world boss timers uh probably 20 people who have flying uh abilities out of eight to ten thousand people on your shirt correct majority of the majority of the items that exist in the game and by majority i mean the vast majority of those items uh are tradable there is not soul bound gear or bind on equip and bind on pickup the economy is built in a way that requires not only the deconstruction of certain items in order to continue to advance on the crafting side of things but also the repair system for d for gear degradation is not some trivial you know simple gold sink they actually require a portion of raw raw and processed materials in order to repair certain types of items um so in that regard we want to make sure that the economy is is a is a closed system uh but it's not it's not bound dependent it is open so it can be traded and sold out okay i wonder if that's ever gonna be i wonder if that they were gonna meet what about uh rich that they could just buy everything and give you know all their newcomers insane gear so here's the thing though there is a significant amount of sinks that exist in the game so um you know a lot of games that i've played in the past and arcade was one of them honestly where there was so much gold generating mechanics and systems available but there was minimal gold sync systems that were present which caused this overtime inflation and inflation is always a mechanic that's difficult to address in mmorpgs right over time but if you present a significant amount of sinks at the higher tier systems right so it's not and cumbersome on new players but it does reflect a kind of endgame state to progression and chase um i think those are going to be sufficient and it really it comes down to testing um a lot of these systems have to be tested and have to be refined and have to be iterated upon what's the idea of a wipe thing before because like what if it inflates so hard you have no control see but here's the here's the thing right if we're talking about uh the transit of goods through caravans when a caravan is destroyed a portion is lost and then a portion is salvageable through the wreckage by the attackers so you're actually sinking materials uh and or processed goods through the caravan system additionally when sieges occur there could be i mean let's say a siege happens on a metropolis and that metropolis is like a crafting central hub and people need access to the raw goods and the materials within the warehouses that are not global those warehouses for for uh gatherables and processed goods are regional based so when they come into that city and they declare the siege nobody knows it's coming right as soon as that declaration happens all of those materials and pro and raw goods are now at risk of being essentially a portion of them being destroyed and the rest of them being then uh uh looted by the attackers if the siege is successful this is that risk versus reward time real quick looted yep correct yeah so essentially what happens is each city has what's called a reliquary and the reliquary begins to spawn unique items for the citizens to take advantage of based on the performance progression and achievements that those citizens have within the world so if your citizens are part of downing a world boss or completing a dungeon in a record time or crafting a legendary item or whatever all of these different types of progression paths for the cities could result in the production of a relic that exists within the reliquary additionally the warehouse has what are called materials and raw goods that exist within these warehouses because it's a regionalized warehouse and if the city is destroyed through the node sieging system there is a wreckage that occurs for registered attackers and the wreckage in the center of the city can be interacted with by the attackers to receive a portion of those goods and a limited access to the relics that existed in the reliquary and this is one of the primary motivators for citizens who are not a part of the alliance network or citizen of a node to essentially siege it not just to pave the way for new content for nodes that couldn't advance but also to get the loot exactly that's interesting but then there's also a huge incentive for people to defend it so that's very good incentive on both sides is the best way right yes exactly i mean that's that's you know there's a philosophy that's been intrinsic in game design over the past decade especially for mmorpgs and that philosophy is everybody's a winner you get a partition participation award reward and that that might be good for retention of certain groups of players but it's very bad when it comes to the satisfaction of achieving something that took effort and time or resources right so we have a we have a firm philosophy in the risk versus reward type of interaction that should exist in games and some people call that more hardcore it's not as long as you have progression paths that have meaningful achievement for both casual players and hardcore players that have varying degrees of investment required in order to achieve certain things um and that's why we feel comfortable with certain design decisions agree 100 with that 300 with that i have another question um i realize that i'm asking questions um when it comes to gear and i if i recall in like lineage 2 and i have a couple questions i know they're going to come in almost the same form but um when it comes to gear is it all gonna be get best gear through rating or there'll be like random rare drops coming from the world that you'll be able to sell and or might be fucking great for in-game or something like that and on top of that question i also want to know is there i i think personally in mmos a huge thing is rarities like the sense of accomplishment but also the sense that oh shit i just got one of the luckiest things ever maybe outside of the dragon obviously or the flying things maybe bosses have certain drops like world of warcraft people go on mount runs right things like that i think are really cool going and trying to get this thing that is very rare to drop you can do it on your own blah blah blah is there any plan on doing things like that yes absolutely so one of the biggest things that i've enjoyed in the past you know when you have games okay so mm-rpgs have a lot of the influence in the mmorpg market at least in the western world in north america and europe stem from eastern created games right and they port over those eastern games into north america and europe and it's the easiest kind of you know thing and there's a lot of rng that's associated with it one of the things that i've enjoyed at least when it comes to like those more grinding oriented games when you're out in a hunting area and just fighting all day long if there isn't a chance for you to strike gold it's boring as hell if there is a chance for you to strike gold it's a chase that you're having fun doing right i would grind in bdo i'd grind pirates forever just knowing that hey i can get one of those items that gives me like a huge increase in gold you know oh man it makes it so much better so in that regard when you're talking about the drop tables that's associated with like trash mobs out in the world that aren't a leader or whatever yes there is a there's a loot table that exists there are going to be random uh chances for players to strike gold and hit you know great items and whatnot uh those chances will increase based off of the the level of the mob based off of the elite status of the mob based off of whether or not it's a dungeon boss or a regional brass kind of thing yeah that's perfect that's perfect that's perfect and that comes with like that'll be in forms of anything like when it comes to like a loot might be a sword it can be a rare material it can be whatever so the rare material that's gonna the materials are gonna stem primarily from the uh gathering tree okay that's fine and yes there are the there's the ability to strike gold when when harvesting a resource as well and when you strike that gold for the resource that resource has the potential um to essentially affect the crafting result uh the processing result and then by effect the crafting result of the item you're creating so legendary crafters will exist in the world right on top of that right you're going to have systems in place for legendary drops that exist with the bosses and and the legendary crafters will be on par with what the legendary drops will entail um the other thing is uh world bosses are going to incorporate a legendary material system as well so there will be materials that can be dropped from legendary bosses those will be required to you to craft a certain crazy shit all right systems right now i'm so sorry i'm so sorry another question when it comes to gear i noticed that a lot of mmos are going a certain route where it's like hey this is pretty much the gear set that you want for your class are you looking more at you want a gear set and maybe it does this effect if you have all of them are you looking for more mismatch your whole setup into what you want to do so there's definitely sets and uh sets when completed of either a particular type or particular theme set theme will create set effects um so you'll have you'll have an overarching set effect that reflects whether or not you're all cloth all leather all uh plate and then you'll have within those categories you'll have sets that exist like you know the the blue scorpion set or you know whatever um and then on top of that you can mix match and the way gear is essentially uh created it's situational upon what encounter you're facing so damage has multiple types right you have non-mitigated damage you have magic based damage you have physical base damage right those types of damage will will be uh when incoming to your character will be mitigated by uh your certain stats that reflect that damage so physical defense magical defense uh convert conversion percentage conversion into health that kind of thing so when you're thinking of like your gear sets that you want to acquire if you're going to go all cloth right you're going to have a higher resistance and damage mitigation to magic type damage but if you're going up against a physical based encounter right and you need that physical damage mitigation you're going to have to have a plate set essentially uh probably i mean you don't have to but you could have asian mechanics as well but you're going to want to go plate set in order to beefing up your physical damage mitigation yeah point is diversity right like point is like having to maybe not just oh i got the set and we're gucci now you know i mean it's not ever going to feel like that well i mean maybe end end game but yeah okay yeah that's what's happening swap that gear in combat all of it that's good you cannot swap gear while you're in combat but you can swap your weapon so your armor set you can't swap it you can swap your weapon out oh my goodness how many okay so what kind of so i'm trying to like correlate i'm trying to put this into words uh is there going to be like a significant amount of uh just like normal dungeons as in four man dungeons or what was it what was your the normal size for you for your dungeons that's fucking bonkers by the way that's actually insane okay that's cool though i actually really like that um because it's almost and it doesn't mean that you have to it doesn't mean that you have to have the eight members in order to accomplish content but it means that the way we balance combat is around an eight-person party and uh you know there are certain modifiers that are applied to the party incoming experience based on the more players that you have in the party so it kind of you know begins to equal out a little bit um so you're you're best positioned in order to essentially the best balance you could have as a party is incorporating all eight base archetypes into your party um so that's going to be your your best bet for completing content archetypes as in classes so classes are different classes are when you combine with your secondary archetype and that creates a possible 64 classes when we say archetype we're really talking mostly about roles so essentially you'll you'll first choose your your one of the eight archetypes and that's going to be your class that you that's going to use that's going to be your archetype that you can't change so that's tank ranger uh um rogue fighter uh cleric mage bard and summoner right now when you hit halfway point up to level 50 when you hit level 25 you're going to select your secondary archetype which will combine with your primary to create your class that secondary archetype isn't going to give you new active skills you're only you're going to get active skills is going to be from your your base primary archetype however what it's going to do is it's going to give you augmentability so essentially let's say you're a a fighter and as a fighter you have an active skill that lets you charge a target over x distance and upon reaching the target you deal x damage and some condition modifier if you were to choose mage as your secondary archetype to for your to create your class you would have access to mage augments so there's going to be four schools of augmentation for each archetype one of the schools for the mage is the teleport school you can take that teleport augment apply it to your charge skill now instead of charging x distance over time you're going to immediately teleport to the target dealing x damage and condition if you were to apply the elemental school to your class ability you would then instead you would charge x distance upon reaching target you would set the target ablaze if it's fired you would electrocute them right and deal with damage over time in addition to that abilities a little bit and augmentability essentially just you know changing one ability just a little bit just essentially just said is there going to be how many of those are going to be augmentability is going to be oh you said how many were there again three of them are three each there's four four schools per arc that means four schools can enhance every single ability with one of those four correct and in order to in order to enhance an ability you have to have the applicable um you have to have the applicable correlating level for access to the augment itself and then upon having access to the augment you'll have to allocate skill points in order to apply the augment to the active skill so there's going to be a certain threshold at which you can no longer augment your active abilities based on the decisions you've augmented previous abilities so you'll have to pick and choose which ones you want to apply the augments towards and certain augments will have more expense required on the skill point side interesting so no so it's almost like there's a chance that no two classes will be the same when you mix the two archetypes it's not just like you are now this and everyone that makes those two archetypes is this correct it's not like that anymore it is you could change it yourself yes so it's really driven by your skill at point allocation so one your first hurdle on skill points is going to be choosing the active skills you want the other thing is there's two additional skill point allocation trees the passive tree and the combat tree so the combat tree reflects your your main weapon choice so let's say you're a one-handed sword user right one-handed swords have the ability so we don't have an auto attack feature we have an active attack feature the active attack feature lets you you know hit your q key or whatever key to attack a target within your forward r core that you have targeted right your weapon your weapon familiarity which is determined by the amount of skill points you allocate to the combat tree will let you unlock certain proc effects when you attack with your primary weapon not with a skill with your primary weapon so essentially a let's say a dagger has some slashing effects that uh bleed the target or that cripple the target or you know do something along those lines every time you attack you have a chance to proc that effect that effect then can synergize with what your active skills tree has available to it so let's say your backstab deals 30 additional damage to a bleeding target if you attack with your main weapon first and the target gets the bleed proc off and you do your backstab skill then you're synergizing your effects additionally skills synergize with other types of skills as well um so you have to allocate your your skill points appropriately interesting kind of fun balancing that oh my god [Laughter] oh you're fun oh man i definitely will be okay interesting what are uh i guess i don't have any i already answered that 40 40 man raids is there is there going to be raids that less than 40 are you guys just going to allow 40 uh you add you add groups to raids essentially then you can add five groups of eight to a raid uh so you could have a group that's added that only has one player or you know five players or four players or whatever okay so you can't go over 40 then correct you can't you can't go over 40. okay oh one of the other ways by the way we were talking earlier about how you know solo players maybe who don't want to be a part of a guild or whatever and there's like soft you know pseudo-factions that they can be a part of um for a player's benefit as well voice over ip is something that's present in the game for groups and raids so raids can allocate group leaders to participate with the talk option and you can mute that person or you can mute that function yourself if you don't want to listen or whatever but it's out of the box present for like pug raids or pug groups so you don't have to exchange like discord information you can chat just easy points yeah i like that i like that big time actually okay cool cool oh man okay question where do you think this game is percentage-wise from where you see it in your head not necessarily where it's at where you would like it to be so i mean in in my opinion like we are going to accomplish every feature we have discussed um the goal here is to create a quality game a lot of mmos that i've played in the past have been ruined by a bad launch that the game wasn't ready to launch before and you know mmos are built off of their initial momentum and it's important to get shit right when you launch an mmorpg so our objective and my objective 100 is to make sure that the quality of the game lives up to the standard that makes us as developers proud and that makes our players proud as well so when we think about you know how we're going to institute these these these uh these systems these mechanics we're doing so from a point of we need to get it right the first time and you know our vision is to institute all of these things oh yeah good that's fucking super good yeah i agree i agree on the whole momentum thing for video games some some people will be like oh man i can't tell you how many people tell me to play the forest today and i just be like nah i'm not playing the forest because like two years ago the force sucked huge wiener and apparently when they launched it and then they made it way better apparently and added lots of things and it's such a good game now but it's like oh man that's already that boat has sailed for me already man you should have launched it better that game's a banger i'm just saying yeah i know i know i don't hear you talk about that's why i brought it up but so does that mean like the launch is kind of i mean i don't want to say in a foreseeable future but like you guys don't really know you're kind of you know playing it by you're still oh no we have we have our internal schedules um you know we pat our our schedule with 30 padding you know there's qa time that's there necessary but the thing that's difficult and just to give you know so i'll say this you know i'll be honest here okay there's a lot of conjecture that is out there you know on mmorpg subreddit or you know with certain content creators whatever that that talk about ashes and like oh it's a scam or you know whatever and that that definitely is difficult to hear because when you're spending your life for the past five years building this game and and also funding it personally uh it's difficult to hear you know those things set but with that being said right the the the goal here is as we go through testing there's gonna be shit that comes up that needs to get fixed and we don't know what we don't know that's gonna come out of that testing you know we can we can take a look at at our schedule we can look at you know past experience and and we're going to estimate out all the tasks that are necessary to complete all these systems and mechanics and whatnot but that's only as good as until we get into testing and and something comes up like okay i'll give you example we got a lot of shit for apocalypse but if we had not done apocalypse as a testing ground for many of the back end systems and the architectures that we're building in the mmorpg right we would not have discovered a significant issue that we did which we had to re-architect a lot of the back-end systems for and if we had continued development on the mmorpg until alpha and then discovered that issue it would have been a whole different beast to fix at that time so you know there's stuff that comes up when you're developing games that you can't predict that you don't know just like in life um and you know our goal again is to make a product that makes us proud and you guys proud so you know it's it's important that you know our schedule is as good as the testing is gonna be okay all right well shit man i honestly haven't looked forward to an mmo in a long time but that's also because uh usually about five minutes into a review of mmo i i find something that i dislike about it whether it be and usually 95 of the time it's oh there's no open world pvp and it's just like well that's that's like a killer for me dude that's that's the game breaker i need to be able to kill who i want to kill uh you know what i'm saying i really like that about this i'll be honest i know that's like a basic bitch thing to really love about mmos but uh yeah but that's because we've been we've been uh it's nobody does it anymore they think like this huge casual crowd like they we don't want to fucking fight each other or something we just want to circle jerk each other and fight some monster and that's it i don't know man it's a breath of fresh air to be able to go through a whole review and like 95 of the things that were said about the mmo that that are coming out you know what i'm saying so very very nice very intriguing when you watch that review and i'd sit here chat with you guys and my other developers are going to watch this you know obviously later in the week and whatnot it means a lot that you guys you know take a look and just opine give your opinion on what we're talking about right we're not we're not we're fully funded we're not looking for people to go like buy the pre-order we don't care about that we offer that stuff because people like it but when it when we talk about essentially you giving your feedback you telling us what resonates with you people in your stream kind of commenting on they like this they don't want that they want the combat to get better you know the visuals need to do this or whatever we take all that stuff in with a grain of salt we go through it we analyze it we have our community team go through it it means a lot to us and and we really you know enjoy essentially people just giving their opinions on stuff yeah hell yeah man hell yeah yeah i'm excited man this is cool i like the uh the transparency i appreciate you coming on and answering some questions uh to be honest that doesn't really happen very often i just because i'm not yeah that's i've obviously mean shot aren't super good at this no i'm good i don't like the formal interview stuff i'm more like talking just like casually about our experiences what we like and shit like that yeah because we kind of bounced around like one but you know one topic we're on this so then we 180 somewhere else so it's not very it's a very formal kind of thing but it's yeah it's nice i'm so stoked to just see like a little gnome looking motherfucker dude or whatever he's a dwarf i'm happy about that i like that i like the diversity and huge versus small characters and everything in between you know what i mean i love it dude what did you say what add-ons is that because i think oh yeah at the moment add-ons were not allowing so listen i know that's a source of subject listen i kind of i'm kind of with you on that i don't like the idea of creating any advantages for people yes that's my feeling too so it's twofold one it's like remember the old days that nostalgia when you didn't have fucking add-ons yeah that told you everything that's happening and you could just mechanically you know uh digest what an encounter is you had trial and error you you messed up and got wiped the first time and you had to like manually look and watch what the hell's happening so the idea of like boss mods and like all that stuff like i'm just not a fan of that stuff it's too easy now yeah so no matter which way you guys go i don't know i understand but like that's i was watching one of my devs real quick i was watching one of my devs uh during lunch he was playing a game and i walked past him and i was like is that even a game because his entire screen was filled with like add-on information and in the very center was this little tiny square of a game that you could see his character in and i was just asking i was like how is that funny it's insane it's insane i've seen some wild players that like fill their screen to the fucking brim it's bonkers uh yeah like i said i'm all for everybody playing on equal grounds um i'm all for uh having not the computer tell me exactly where everything is um you know unfortunately in eso that's what we're doing right now actually we've freaking got a map add-on to just tell me where everything in the game is especially so it's like yeah it just takes away from it a lot actually takes away from the law so yeah i agree 100 with no add-ons you got i'm in your corner on that one no matter which way it ends up going you know what i mean yeah i would trust that you guys know what you're doing on that field right i mean maybe at the very least you can allow ui like small like little things like that who knows but i do agree you give too much information from with add-ons and then what's the point of playing and learning when it tells you it all you know yeah oh bro the idea of oh yo uh dudes doing a fire breath in three seconds like okay thanks man who's saying this we have a narrator watching our fight you know but yeah dude i appreciate it man it's super cool to talk to you um and it's it's it's good to know that there's not listen i can't even classify this as a hardcore or casual mmo and that's exactly how it should be you know what i'm saying it should just be an mmo and that should come with it you know you feel me on that so and i'm happy i'm happy that it has that um i trust me i've been missing terra so much just being able to kill whoever i want to i keep going back to this but uh that's my huge number one yeah so yeah anyways uh shroud you have anything left to say add questions no i mean i can sit here all day but you're the one streaming dude i'm retired i'm a vacation baby free agent relax um i appreciate taking the time by the way summit shroud it's it's i always enjoy talking about mmos and i love talking about ashes so i appreciate the opportunity of chatting with you yeah it's good to get the specifics because honestly i vaguely just thought that ashes of creation was i don't know just kind of on autopilot heading forward and people had forgotten about it i'm happy to hear that uh that's not the case honestly so yeah as we enter new testing phases uh you know it's gonna get ramped up a little bit i think in the community and people will see what's happening oh hell yeah oh hell yeah um yeah yeah keep me in mind uh for any sort of participation that could be done on stream i would really love it um yeah i know a guy i could probably get you into an alpha or something oh you know a guy sweet yeah that'd be perfect that'd be perfect hey man we appreciate your time man and kind of like setting the record straight at least for my channel absolutely awesome hey thanks brother man yep take care guys all right man see you later later all right boys that was cool that was cool that was cool dude this is the first time i think i've been excited for in a long time a huge shout out to the lazy peons for kind of just putting this back into my lap i appreciate it and uh yeah thank you guys for everybody uh you know tuning in and uh getting the the dev to come in and say what's up and yeah Ashes of Creation look at this little motherfucker i wanna be a gnome dude or a dwarf or whatever it is uh before i go here i just want to say thanks for including me in that i appreciate that oh yeah bro i wasn't interviewing by myself i'm a doofus you know i needed extra questions in between my stupid questions dude my questions are always just about combat and like fucking like just want to know how good the game is going to feel in pvp and yeah but dude there's a lot of crazy shit a lot of crazy shit that video is very intriguing it's pretty in-depth for sure i mean i like the idea that he played lineage too and got some ideas for that because i love lineage too um i thought that pvp was super cool i have a lot he's got yeah he's got it he's got ideas from everybody feels like eft inspired by everything yeah all right feels like eft man dev style at least you know yeah i just went over by the time true motherfucker i think i think steven's got god man i think hellman left he started true he was just like we're passionate we're tired of like other yeah passion project we're tired of other games doing it wrong we're gonna do it right so that's exactly kind of why this is very interesting it looks like their numbers are pretty low too i mean they're sitting here fighting a dragon this motherfucker's still hitting for like 50s with an aoe you know i mean like it's not like overdone on numbers yeah i don't see you yeah but this this could all this is just like the testing you know we don't know what level they are because we don't have god mode that's one thing that's going to be really oh shit that flame breath looks sick pretty cool i'm stoked man i'm super stoked fuck i hate when i get excited about video games that are far out