Post by JustVine on 2021-08-29 08:48:24
Honestly I am kind of on the fence right now for two reasons.
1. Without knowing what summoners design is going to be like relative to the combat system, it's really hard to say if I will get to enjoy the open world pvp. I love strategic combat. I love team combat, but god do pet classes usually suck in pvp. I originally had more faith Ashes would be the one to breal the curse but some of their design decisions relative to action combat are making me question that. If they go split body my hope for a good summon class will drop quite a bit.
2. They have said very little about farming. I am a farmer. I am a tavern owner. If the farming system sucks my ability to meaningfully participate in the economy drops considerably. I know what crafts I like to do in games. Farming is my jam. Ashes claims they will have one. But if it sucks I am less targeted as an audience.
Why I think I am probably in the intended target audience anyway:
...
I crave a good economic system where travel and emergent regional trends matter. Every mmo I have played other than ffxi (which I arrived slightly too late to existence it's true peak) has a terrible stale meaningless economy. Ashes hits so many things I would do if I were making an mmo with a good economic system. Ashes claims it requires so much interconnectivity between crafts and players. I can't help but feel targeted. I'm risk tolerant enough that i'd be one of the brave crafters wilding out for rare stuff and Ashes will need people like me for the game to be great economically.
Team based combat is what I want out of an mmo most. I am tired of mmos with either too small a team size for my core team, or too few or inflexible roles. The 8 classes Ashes chose for it's archtypes make me really believe they mean it when they say they want a good teamwork oriented experience. I just need the 2nd archetypes to really deliver in flexibility in role and play style for certain team members and the combat system to not be ass for these three things to be a masterpiece for me. I really hope Jeffery's influence on the teamwork oriented design focus holds through.
Even if they end up missing me due to design mistakes or narrowing their scope I think the above are some pretty damn good reasons for thinking I am their target audience.
Well given the last live stream I am decidedly on one side of the fence now with 'room to get back on it' if the farming and gathering experience is top notch.
The biggest reason for my switch in stance is related to summoner directly. It's not any one thing that made me lose faith in their ability to make a good pvp pet class. It's a congregation of poor design approaches and choices relative to it.
'We are leaning towards split body combat.' Sure that's fine on it's own. There are definitely ways to make a pet class work with that. But the ai has to be fairly intelligent compared to other games when PvP is involved. Is this being factored? Are they targeting the pet class audience when they make such statements?
If they choose to 'make the ai even SMARTER' to make up for the opponents ability to move in ways that trick the summon into bad positions/being slow with it's attacks and ability useage well now you've gotten to why I am so uncertain.
The ai in the alpha was so rudimentary it led me to question what kind of ai developers they have on staff. Think about the dragons. The dragons I would have spent a decent amount of time and resources to show case exactly what I want my mmo to feel like? Their ai was rudimentary. Different design priorities than me I guess. We would have FELT the presences of an ai dev during alpha. There would have been no reason to have held back on a better ai or large changes to the ai for the dragons if they had the developer skill on staff I am talking about.
There is a lot of trials and difficulty in game dev. Sometimes things you don't want to get cut, that were im your original plan, get cut. People panic when timelines get tight. Allegedly there was plans for how summoner is supposed to work. They just made a big decision that would be very unreasonable to assume they had made three years ago when making those summoner design decisions (otherwise why the a b testing and humming and hawing up to this point?)
Therefore, because it increases the difficulty in making summoner. Split body with no ai developer threatens the development of summoner itself. I really doubt Intrepid will release without summoner. But what if they did, or simplified it to the point of unplayability until a later patch. What am I supposed to do with my 9 months of paid subscription? Such things have happened in many other games. It is an unfortunately common occurrence.
I want to play with my friends day 1.
Again 'split body pet class in a PvP setting' is do able. With good enough ai, server latency, ability activation delay veing optimal etc... But it's definitely harder. It puts a lot more on the stack than if they had chosen root motion.
Which lead me to a consideration not explicitly mentioned in stream.
'We don't plan on balancing for 1v1'. Sure that's fine, but Summoner by nature of not being able to establish what exact role they are playing at any given time due to the flexibility of their pets, is the hardest to balance period. If it takes longer to make due to split body, it means balance is going to come later in the schedule. Now again think time tables. If you were Intrepid and there was a risk that Summoner could steam roll content or pvx content and timelines are getting tight. I know I would cut summoner or at least hamstring it. Because summoner being missing or bad is a much smaller pr nightmare than content feeling meaningless or pointless to people on day 1 due to whack class balance.
That all leads to a culmination to this last nugget from the stream.
'We don't want corruption to be too strong of a deterrent because if it does too good a job it stops being a moderating force to the option.'
On paper corruption felt like it supported a wolf vs wolf design. Make people who actually want to fight rewarded for doing so, and have a reasonable detterent for assholes picking on crafters. A wolf vs wolf centric design if you will. I was into this idea at first, but it SOUNDS like the devs are more into the whole 'wolves vs sheep' scenario given the way Steven phrased it. The tonal shift indicates to me that they will see 'large suppression of PvP against greens (sheep)' as a /bad/ thing and will tune the penalties in favor of the wolves
But now that I am less sure my class will be day 1 ready due to these design priorities and choices. I am less certain I will have a reason to fight back in the beginning. Fighting back just feeds the wolves. We have TWENTY YEARS OF STUDY to show why wolf vs sheep design didn't tend to work out. Are they targeting the crafting audiences when they make such statements? It sounds a lot more like they are 'reassuring the wolves' with such statements. Am I going to get to be a wolf? If not, their design leanings make me less sure I will have much to do at all day 1. I'm interested in crafting and pvp. Not a total gank box.
Tl;dr I feel they have made two distinctions of who their target audience is. They have showed that pet classes was NOT their priority target audience by their lack of accounting for the various design problems such a class requires to solve to make a GOOD pet class in the systems they are choosing. They have made it clear they are going for a wolf vs sheep dichotomy which I guess, I count as 'a sheep' given both their combat design relative to pet classes and over all attitude towards how they will go forward with balancing and fine tuning corruption down the road (ie balancing in FAVOR of the wolves.)