NO PVP on the Freehold Please!

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Unless they're so damn stupid that they can't see right in front of their faces or think 1.1 steps ahead - yes they're aware. And they've said as much countless times, with one of the biggest Steven quotes being "this game will not be for everyone".

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I dunno how the game looked/sounded before 2020, because that was when I found out about it, but I got interested in it exactly because it came from those roots, so the image definitely didn't change in the last 3 years. The open seas change was probably the biggest step towards PvPfying the game even more, but the details about corruption balancing kinda counteract that.

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I guess this is why we've had different outlook on the game's prospects.

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Balance of corruption gain and clearing values. Also its scaling in relation to your PK count. The stat dampening values and the whole BH system details too.

All of those are balancing tools for the owpvp and the pvpness of the game will depend on how all of those end up being designed on release.

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While I get your point, Steven is the reason why this game exists and why it has some of the features I want in my mmos. This is pretty much the same situation as when some dumb execs at the top of a big gaming company tell their devs what to make. Except here we have an oldschool gamer with money who prefers a particular sub-genre of games.

Obviously other devs and designers will influence the development, but unless Steven really says "fuck it all, I'm selling this piece of shit to some venture capital company and bouncing" - I doubt the core principles would change.

And as Steven has said in the past, their onboarding process is quite rigorous and they talk to the potential employees on several topics before deciding whether Intrepid wants them. I'd imagine that sharing at least a part of Steven's vision would be one of those topics.

In other words, just as any logical person would expect some shitty monetization practices from Blizz, because they're controlled by greedy execs, I think it's quite logical to expect L2/AA-like mechanics from a game that's not only led but also paid for by a dude who loved those games.

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Guess our opinions on this topic just differ. To me it doesn't matter what people made before, but what they want to make now and what features it takes on. If I hear "we have these L2 features in the game" I think "this game is inspired by L2, so it has its roots in it".

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So yeah, this was the piece of info I was missing then.

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I dunno how many western devs L2 had early on, outside of Richard Garriott. Some of them might've shifted specialties or quit completely or are just working on other games and don't wanna leave those companies.

Professionals are still just professionals, so imo it's completely fine to hire a person with a great background in another game to make a new game that's quite different from their previous work. I'd imagine that Steven's the one who dictates the core design of the game. We obviously had Jeff as the lead and I'm sure he pushed for better and deeper designs too, which is why we might get several great systems that were nowhere near L2, but in the Intrepid's situation of "this is Steven's baby that he wants to release no matter what" I wouldn't really rely on other devs' experience to try and predict what the game will be.

That kickstarter section is just a marketing ploy to decrease any potential scam alerts for people. Just as people trusted Double Fine with their money cause they knew that name from previous games, seeing big mmo names on an mmo kickstarter builds trust in people's minds.

But as you said, I guess the L2ness of the game wasn't really evident back then, so I understand why oldschool followers would think that the game started leaning more towards pvp.

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Mostly this. While I'm happy to play Ashes if it is close to L2, I actually just don't feel like it really can be.

I'll be happy for Intrepid to prove me wrong, but the 'skeleton' of this game doesn't seem to match the 'meat on the bones' intended, to me, still.

And as Dygz says, a lot of that comes down to the fact that the Open Seas PvP exists. It's similar to Albion in that regard.

Albion wouldn't need to be 'not Full Loot' to be palatable to me (it already kinda is) because that would just change the structure of the power dynamics. Albion would need to have a structure where the 'the real game' didn't start in the always-flagged/no penalty area.

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Azherae wrote: »

And as Dygz says, a lot of that comes down to the fact that the Open Seas PvP exists. It's similar to Albion in that regard.

Yeah, I got no rebuttal to that. I still hope it goes away, even if I like its base mechanics.

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That's the thing, I don't know if we're just weird, but no one I know cares about that, because that's part of the dynamism of the world, it's what one signed up for.

And there's other reasons, related to the overall difficulty of things like Node Sieges, it being part of the story, and so on. I don't care if the node gets destroyed, it's a little frustrating, but it's part of the experience in a way that 'just being relegated to second class because you can't win against whatever the latest weird cheap or broken tactic' isn't.

Macro-activity isn't as annoying, this even applies to ganking and PvP to an extent. If I know that it took 8 coordinated people to achieve the 'gank' and set me back, then it's not the same as the general flow that you get from 'yeah this situation just loops because you're the wrong class and your friends aren't on'.

I don't think it's healthy for MMOs to have the 'problem' that MOBAs have where you just 'don't play because your friends aren't on and it's no fun to play with toxic randoms'.

So while that might not make a lot of sense, we're definitely much more concerned with 'small random ganks' than coordinated GvG or 'the loss of a Node'. Losing your Node restarts the gameplay loop with different conditions. Being ganked (in the case where you fight back because that's what you're supposed to do') and the opponent just keeps trying to make your play session 'meaningless' doesn't really restart the loop at all.