[Feedback Request] Alpha Two Citadel of the Steel Bloom & Firebrand Preview | August Livestream

Azherae wrote: »

For my group in general, expect great negativity.
@GrandSerpent will be alternately praising and complaining about visuals and visual design

First, a few things I'd like to highlight as positives :

So far, the environment art look good. I particularly like the material work on the various stone textures, and the overall density of the foliage. The various patches of ivy, overgrown planters, and grass growing up from gaps in the stone are very effective at making the area appear dilapidated and disused.

I liked the VFX work on the fire dragon. The breath attack was very satisfying, and I liked the gradient from blue to orange flame, and the heat distortion effect. It reminded me a jet engine with afterburners on.

Lighting looks good, especially in shadowed areas which are illuminated by bounce light. I'm assuming this is using Lumen in UE5?

And a few points of critique :

While the volumetric haze effect looks good, right now it's quite strong, and I am finding that it's obscuring some environment details, and hurting readability of the scene. I think this could be more effective if the strength of this effect was tied to time of day (representing early morning mist), or tied to weather or other temporary environmental effects, rather than being always present.

While ability VFX in general look good individually, many of these are flashy, bright, and highly saturated. When many different abilities are being used at once, it makes the battle status hard to parse visually. This was especially true in the confined gatehouse environment towards the beginning of the stream.

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Alright well, the good thing about my side of the feed back is that a lot of it is stuff you probably, as developers, want to do and haven't gotten to yet. Assume that while I might get a little harsh here, I know this is a work and progress and am mostly hoping I am aiding some of the designers here that wish they could put more sauce on this pasta.

Assume everything listed here is a positive thing I liked unless it has 'negative' or 'mixed' tagged in front of it:

History about the Forsaken Blade

The fact that being at the tail end of the story arc made an impregnable fortress open for infiltration. I like this detail.

• Mixed - The impregnable castle is super clean and not overgrown with no signs of ghosts/holy forces maintaining it from being overgrown.

The forsaken blades using the cultists. Potential ecological/socially dynamic interplay between various non-player actors and forces.

A vague tell of what the relic is by what benefit it is giving the entrenched residents of the fortress

• Negatives: the name is goofy, cheesy, stupid, and fake sounding. 'orb of ultimate essence'? Come on fam. It's a dragon egg being used as a channeling implement for dark magic. Even calling it straight up 'Firebrand's Legacy' would be an improvement.

Order of the Steelbloom and Lady of the Rose lore could be cool. I like most of the details given here. I also liked the quest structure - fight through to ghost spawn point, spawn ghost, that spawns insurgent waves of npc's trying to stop you, safely escort ghost, have ghost do something and support ghost while fending off waves. However this was probably the spot I had the most critique and concern on.

• Confused: I do not need be on this quest to be in this area, and it looks like a good xp grind spot. What incentives are there for me to allow other people to proceed with doing this quest. It looks currently, that there are a lot of reasons why I would just want to disrupt the quest from taking place.
• Confused: If I can heal this ghost.... can non-party members HARM this ghost? If it is the case that we can harm the lady, I feel like this quest has some major design problems it must resolve. There is just too much incentive to spawn camp the ghost to trigger the wave of dissenters to wash off corruption from killing people intending to do the quest. It becomes much too easy to end people's attempts to stop the quest. I also see some strong potential for guilds to form an encampment here. Have one party with the quest keep triggering the ghost summon, have non partyed allies gank and kill and wash off the corruption by hunting the surrounding mobs/enemy waves. Repeat as long as you want.
• Negatives: The wave preventing the summon of the ghost felt super underwhelming and lacked a lot of complexity I'd expect for such an important moment in the operation of the penultimate quest for this story line.
• Negatives: Given the outcome of this quest is about stealing a dragon egg, I'd expect that this entire quest would not go anywhere near the way it was presented on stream. There are too many reasons why it'd be apparent what was happening and there would definitely be Firebrand supporters out to aid 'he who beguiles' as well as preventing the party from summoning the lady of the rose.
• Confused: This ghost looks nothing like I'd expect her to look. If she's the leader of the steel bloom why doesn't she have armor on? If it's a mage guild why is it called 'steel bloom' and not like 'The Rose's Thorns' if it's a battlemage group? Maybe this is something that makes more sense in context. At least she has a sword tho. I'm sure I wouldn't be complaining here if she actually used the sword.

I really like the premise of this quest over all. I think there is a lot here story wise. I also think the ghost being helped is a really good premise for 'epic' tier missions where you learn more about the history of stuff through these 'echoes of the past' npc characters. I also think there is a lot of potential here from the 'cultist' and 'bad guy' side of things not touched on.

• Negatives: Why the heck was the ghost not fighting He-who-beguiles? Why was He-who-Beguiles not like... Beguiling people? I assume you just haven't animated it yet but the fact that NEITHER OF THEM WERE FIGHTING I hope is an aspect that changes in the future.

Getting the dragon egg and it having the immediate consequence of revealing your location to firebrand now that it has been removed from it's safe is great

• Negatives: Firebrand should have shown up way earlier at the door. He should have flooded the entrance with summons and buffed the re-spawned members of the Forsaken Blade. I know this was for show but the fact that he was not attacking the egg holder really broke my immersion and I hope that the person who has the egg is a primary target for Firebrand later on. I wanted Firebrand to have much more interaction with the world and the general set up for things. Breathing fire breath down the entrance of the fortress as it pours in a swarm of fire elementals is a way more dramatic and believable scene than fighting the dragon in a wide open field.
• Negatives: Going to be real here, I kind of miss the adds of the Firebrand fight being 'illusions of Firebrand made by heated wind projections' from Alpha-1. I also don't like how fire didn't seem to heal the elementals and firebrand wasn't boosting his summons/adds with his fire abilities as a tactic.

Overall I had a hard time believing in the presentation this time for a very simple reason. There was no PvP and therefore this felt more like a table top session than what Ashes claims it's going to be. If you all believe in your PvP vision and think the fights are cool in the context of PvP you should maybe actually show us what big story pieces like this look in context of the actual intended gameplay. For now, I'll assume this was just the cinematic trailer rather than the gameplay trailer.

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That's unlikely, because other players who intend to assist Firebrand will be able to risk corruption to prevent raises happening at the preferred/good timings.

That would be one of their #1 priorities in the battle, actually, because they can rely on Firebrand to do the damage, and then move away (giving the attackers an opportunity to revive the fallen). They then have to be on point to prevent the resurrections, but they don't need to be in Firebrand's AoE at the previous part where people were actually dying.

Fights like this are supposed to be hard-fought between two groups of players. Making the resurrection too difficult would remove the entire challenge/interplay of the PvP.

I was originally going to just talk about the dragon as noted, but the Steel Bloom segment irked me enough on watching more closely that I have to talk about it too.

You noted that all the enemies present were two-stars or higher, definitely elite mobs, but they didn't seem to have any special mechanics. If they did, they didn't affect the group much other than one person getting occasionally blasted. Further, there wasn't much effort in terms of positioning, and even when Steven (a cleric) face pulled a bunch, they barely seemed to hurt him. Either the enemies are very underwhelming, or the party is too over leveled to show off this content - neither is a good look.

There was a lot of talk about the Lady of the Rose being a great warrior, but she kinda just stood there and channeled. I feel like this undersells her character as any kind of threat, and the same goes for the demon that spawned in the ritual - it seemed to not be much threat to her or anyone. It seems like there's no real commitment here to threat, if there's that many enemies around her with AOE attacks that close by, I would expect her to take more damage and be under real threat.

Speaking of which, no matter how much Steven or anyone else healed, the enemies didn't go after them, even though DPS+tank were not specifically pushing for it. Healing having no downside in a PVE environment makes combat stale and, again, either the party is too over leveled, or there's something fundamentally wrong about how Threat is being spread out, and neither option is a good look.

On to the dragon. Animations and model look great, SFX are pretty good. But actually fighting it...there was a push to talk about how this one would be different and more complex than what you would expect, and I feel like it didn't deliver. This is not more complex than the fire or poison dragons from Alpha 1 in any significant capacity, and I was hoping for something more after hearing Tradd and Chong talk it up so much. The rings in particular seemed underwhelming in terms of overall effect, as did the shockwaves. This is another case where I can't tell if the raid was over leveled or the dragon is underwhelming, but despite poor positioning, a lot of people definitely managed to not take much damage from these even with no Bard Shield.

You noted you had two dwarf tanks, but it was difficult to tell who, or what, the dragon was aiming for a lot of the time. The threat reactions from Firebrand are confusing and strange, and while the breath attacks and such make sense to aim with anti Zerg ideals in mind, his basic attacks didn't aim consistently in big contrast to the other enemies who were kind of stuck on certain people, and it concerns me.

Finally, if people who get up from Resurrection only have 50% HP as a downside, the cooldown is way too short. Given how long it takes Firebrand to take anyone down, if this is an expected level to fight Firebrand at, all you need to do is bring 4 or 5 clerics and nobody will ever stay dead, even if they don't have infinite health like Steven. This seems poorly structured and either the person getting up should suffer more consequences, or Resurrection should have a longer cooldown, because as it stands you're setting yourself up for some Zergimg the system despite anti-zerg measures implemented in Firebrand himself.

Overall: this was either poorly presented or there's some serious issues in PVE systems, and I'm really hoping it's the former.