Post by JustVine on 2023-07-01 15:02:13
Sooooo since everyone is now distracted by the bidding system. Let's talk about the other problems presented in the showcase.
Farming: So we weren't really told much of anything about the farming here so a lot of it is speculation and extrapolation.
Aesthetics: Everything just looks much too tidy and uniform and this is not the models fault. BDO tends to have this same issue, but they solve it through the actual placement of your crops being possible to make more irregular and through having the surrounding foliage and grass on wherever you are planting be part of the furrow. So when you get to the polishing phase, my recommendation is to go a similar route. Don't make furrows these 'realistic' things, make them more like a garden where things can be placed a little more organically and haphazardly, but keep the neat and tidy arrangements you showed today as a preset that any player can achieve within the more freeform system. You mentioned being able to mix and match crops in a furrow but it will look awful to do so without a freeform placement system.
Mechanics of Theft: So I am really glad the team seems to have taken my criticism from years ago about how we needed the ability to steal from farmers or threaten them in some way, but there are some flaws with the current intended implementation. First of all nothing about security or defenses were noted and I think that is a real shame. You spoke a lot about the ability to customize your freehold, but let's face it, if you intend to introduce THAT much risk to a person using their freehold, no one is going to want to do it without options for more security. Guard NPC's and Pet monsters that when killed give the attacking players a small amount of corruption would be a great start. We should also think about giving players blueprints for walls, turrets, magical clouds of debuff effects and explosions, general traps, even ballistae. What is the saying? The home is a persons castle? Why not just roll with that now that freeholds are big enough to be a landed nobles estate. You definitely have enough room to do so and you will be implementing similar mechanics for node seiges and defenses anyway.
Over all I'm glad some risk was added to the system, but think we need ways to mitigate it somewhat.
Mechanics of Growing: It sounds like you will have water and fertilizer management which is great, but I didn't hear anything about pest management. I think you should reconsider that if you are not going to have it, as pest management is one of the few areas of farming that you can really lean into the interactivity of the craft. BDO for example will have occasional quick time events where a mole will suddenly spawn while you are farming and you can chase them down to get some small resources back. The sudden-ness of it makes you really have to pay attention if you want to maximize your gains. It didn't sound like water management was going to be very important beyond 'hey water this' either, although you didn't say much about it. I feel like the water management system is the main area where you can make freehold placement and where the furrows are placed on your freehold really integrated and immersive. I'd be quite surprised if you could grow tomatos in a dryer area just because you can spam a water bucket.
I highly encourage your developers look into BDO's system for insight on how to do that. In BDO right now I have to worry about how often it rains and where my farm is on the water table and what happens to rain after a storm relative to the precipitation in the area. If you can't get that level of detail in Ashes, I believe over all the game will just be outright inferior for farming as opposed to BDO. You can get PvP on a farm in BDO. There is a ton of cost/fuel management in BDO. There is a lot of planning and interactivity in BDO's farming relatively. Oh and of course in BDO anyone can be a master farmer if they want to put in the blood sweat and tears into it, where as this is not the case in Ashes. Not everyone who wants the farm will be able to farm and not everyone of those actual farmers is going to be able to achieve mastery... No matter how much they may want to. There is nothing special about Ashes interactivity at the moment as it's mostly just 'press e to harvest and nothing further' which by the way I really hope is a place holder because wow is that not immersive. If you are going to make farming such an achievement I would hope you still made it fun to do and didn't just cut corners because you don't expect people who actually want really immersive crafting to get into it in the first place. Be better than BDO please. You have the pieces to do so.
Mechanics of Livestock: This is where press e to harvest better be a place holder the most. If milking cows isn't a rythm minigame like BDO what are you even doing here. I'm fine with slaughtering livestock as that is where food comes from. There are other animals you can raise like chickens, sheep, and dairy cows available if you want to raise livestock but don't want to kill them. I'm sure you can throw in fantasy elements here as well to spice things up a bit. Maybe there are turtles that grow nodules of fruit or meat on them that you can harvest from the bushes on their backs. We already know some turtles in Verra can get quite big and have symbiotic plants on their shells already.
Mechanics of Storage: Ugh, tetris AND stacks? Stacks and limited slots in inventory were already going to far and well enough for 'making you think about what you are choosing' and 'creating moments of pause where you have to make decisions on your inventory'. Heck I'd take stacks and weight like in BDO over this nonsense. More over this adds a layer of tedium to freehold crafting in general I wasn't expecting. If you don't have a way for crafting while at a structure to avoid some of these issues via an 'infinite temporary slot while working' things are going to be really obnoxious when you reach a certain point of overflow or complexity in your crafting or processing. You mentioned having bags that could circumvent some of this nonsense, but that isn't good enough if you have to literally go out in the world to hunt or buy said bags. They should be 'buyable' at a freehold without any interaction with anyone else if you are so insistent on this system because that level of inconvenience while crafting is a pain. Believe me, it happens in Minecraft, BDO, and FFXI and THEY aren't NEARLY as restricted as what you are presenting.
Mechanics of Crafting: So in the slide show, which I really appreciated by the way, we saw a bunch of slides with crafting menus and I cannot tell you how disappointed I am with the implications here. Menu based crafting is the lowest form of crafting imaginable. It breaks my immersion on SEVERAL levels. Crafting is supposed to be a very involved physical process. There are very few acts where I'd be 'looking at a ledger or manual' in artisan professions. I hope, therefore, that there is more to it than what we saw in the sneak peak. I'm ok with menus when it fits immersion. Planning what to craft and setting up all your materials is fine. Planning and picking your skills in a menu is fine. But that's about the limit. Keep crafting largely in world and figure out a way to make menus small and not full screen. If there is too much detail to make it small, you probably need to rethink the menu and presentation!
Overall Impression: The game has really gone backwards in it's aesthetic. The freeholds were so brown and muddy. Everything lacked color and pop. You went full war craft with your combat and armor aesthetics and general lighting models so I'm surprised things were so 'gritty and realistic' here (and not in a good way.)
The freeholds themselves were far too 'tidy' looking due to the dirt road system. You should really try to figure out if there is a way to integrate the foliage you are placing the freehold on with the structures you put on top of them or all freeholds will look very same-y.
I wasn't really impressed with anything here. It looked like a slightly concentrated form of BDO's crafting systems and furniture interactivity for the most part and I already have that experience. If anything it seemed a bit more shallow than BDO in some ways.
I'm fairly concerned with how open the over all layout of freeholds is. They look kind of bloated with far too much space. I think 1 acre could have fit all the structures your example freehold had here. And with that bloated space makes it far more attackable and easy to sneak up and gank people. It's yet another reason we really need security structures in the game as a generality.
You didn't give much of a look at processing so its hard to say if I'm disappointed here. I'll just wait for more information. But you are going to have to explain and do more with processing than 'press e to excite the crafting user base'.
I really like the idea of inns but think they are a solution in search of a problem. The problem is how limited housing is in the first place. Giving people temp houses does almost nothing to benefit and immerse the player. You aren't going to care about 'decorating a hotel room'. It's just there to 'make sure players don't fall behind' and I respect that.
Some of the views in game were gorgeous, it shows me there is potential for the game to look nice if you give your artists a little more freedom to be colorful and stylized.
I liked the slide show. I need you all to do that sort of thing more often as it really helps keep things clear and gets into the important systems design details. And to whichever person kept 'interrupting' with more details and explanations. THANK YOU YOU WERE GREAT KEEP INTERRUPTING TO CLARIFY DESIGNS!
Farming: So we weren't really told much of anything about the farming here so a lot of it is speculation and extrapolation.
Aesthetics: Everything just looks much too tidy and uniform and this is not the models fault. BDO tends to have this same issue, but they solve it through the actual placement of your crops being possible to make more irregular and through having the surrounding foliage and grass on wherever you are planting be part of the furrow. So when you get to the polishing phase, my recommendation is to go a similar route. Don't make furrows these 'realistic' things, make them more like a garden where things can be placed a little more organically and haphazardly, but keep the neat and tidy arrangements you showed today as a preset that any player can achieve within the more freeform system. You mentioned being able to mix and match crops in a furrow but it will look awful to do so without a freeform placement system.
Mechanics of Theft: So I am really glad the team seems to have taken my criticism from years ago about how we needed the ability to steal from farmers or threaten them in some way, but there are some flaws with the current intended implementation. First of all nothing about security or defenses were noted and I think that is a real shame. You spoke a lot about the ability to customize your freehold, but let's face it, if you intend to introduce THAT much risk to a person using their freehold, no one is going to want to do it without options for more security. Guard NPC's and Pet monsters that when killed give the attacking players a small amount of corruption would be a great start. We should also think about giving players blueprints for walls, turrets, magical clouds of debuff effects and explosions, general traps, even ballistae. What is the saying? The home is a persons castle? Why not just roll with that now that freeholds are big enough to be a landed nobles estate. You definitely have enough room to do so and you will be implementing similar mechanics for node seiges and defenses anyway.
Over all I'm glad some risk was added to the system, but think we need ways to mitigate it somewhat.
Mechanics of Growing: It sounds like you will have water and fertilizer management which is great, but I didn't hear anything about pest management. I think you should reconsider that if you are not going to have it, as pest management is one of the few areas of farming that you can really lean into the interactivity of the craft. BDO for example will have occasional quick time events where a mole will suddenly spawn while you are farming and you can chase them down to get some small resources back. The sudden-ness of it makes you really have to pay attention if you want to maximize your gains. It didn't sound like water management was going to be very important beyond 'hey water this' either, although you didn't say much about it. I feel like the water management system is the main area where you can make freehold placement and where the furrows are placed on your freehold really integrated and immersive. I'd be quite surprised if you could grow tomatos in a dryer area just because you can spam a water bucket.
I highly encourage your developers look into BDO's system for insight on how to do that. In BDO right now I have to worry about how often it rains and where my farm is on the water table and what happens to rain after a storm relative to the precipitation in the area. If you can't get that level of detail in Ashes, I believe over all the game will just be outright inferior for farming as opposed to BDO. You can get PvP on a farm in BDO. There is a ton of cost/fuel management in BDO. There is a lot of planning and interactivity in BDO's farming relatively. Oh and of course in BDO anyone can be a master farmer if they want to put in the blood sweat and tears into it, where as this is not the case in Ashes. Not everyone who wants the farm will be able to farm and not everyone of those actual farmers is going to be able to achieve mastery... No matter how much they may want to. There is nothing special about Ashes interactivity at the moment as it's mostly just 'press e to harvest and nothing further' which by the way I really hope is a place holder because wow is that not immersive. If you are going to make farming such an achievement I would hope you still made it fun to do and didn't just cut corners because you don't expect people who actually want really immersive crafting to get into it in the first place. Be better than BDO please. You have the pieces to do so.
Mechanics of Livestock: This is where press e to harvest better be a place holder the most. If milking cows isn't a rythm minigame like BDO what are you even doing here. I'm fine with slaughtering livestock as that is where food comes from. There are other animals you can raise like chickens, sheep, and dairy cows available if you want to raise livestock but don't want to kill them. I'm sure you can throw in fantasy elements here as well to spice things up a bit. Maybe there are turtles that grow nodules of fruit or meat on them that you can harvest from the bushes on their backs. We already know some turtles in Verra can get quite big and have symbiotic plants on their shells already.
Mechanics of Storage: Ugh, tetris AND stacks? Stacks and limited slots in inventory were already going to far and well enough for 'making you think about what you are choosing' and 'creating moments of pause where you have to make decisions on your inventory'. Heck I'd take stacks and weight like in BDO over this nonsense. More over this adds a layer of tedium to freehold crafting in general I wasn't expecting. If you don't have a way for crafting while at a structure to avoid some of these issues via an 'infinite temporary slot while working' things are going to be really obnoxious when you reach a certain point of overflow or complexity in your crafting or processing. You mentioned having bags that could circumvent some of this nonsense, but that isn't good enough if you have to literally go out in the world to hunt or buy said bags. They should be 'buyable' at a freehold without any interaction with anyone else if you are so insistent on this system because that level of inconvenience while crafting is a pain. Believe me, it happens in Minecraft, BDO, and FFXI and THEY aren't NEARLY as restricted as what you are presenting.
Mechanics of Crafting: So in the slide show, which I really appreciated by the way, we saw a bunch of slides with crafting menus and I cannot tell you how disappointed I am with the implications here. Menu based crafting is the lowest form of crafting imaginable. It breaks my immersion on SEVERAL levels. Crafting is supposed to be a very involved physical process. There are very few acts where I'd be 'looking at a ledger or manual' in artisan professions. I hope, therefore, that there is more to it than what we saw in the sneak peak. I'm ok with menus when it fits immersion. Planning what to craft and setting up all your materials is fine. Planning and picking your skills in a menu is fine. But that's about the limit. Keep crafting largely in world and figure out a way to make menus small and not full screen. If there is too much detail to make it small, you probably need to rethink the menu and presentation!
Overall Impression: The game has really gone backwards in it's aesthetic. The freeholds were so brown and muddy. Everything lacked color and pop. You went full war craft with your combat and armor aesthetics and general lighting models so I'm surprised things were so 'gritty and realistic' here (and not in a good way.)
The freeholds themselves were far too 'tidy' looking due to the dirt road system. You should really try to figure out if there is a way to integrate the foliage you are placing the freehold on with the structures you put on top of them or all freeholds will look very same-y.
I wasn't really impressed with anything here. It looked like a slightly concentrated form of BDO's crafting systems and furniture interactivity for the most part and I already have that experience. If anything it seemed a bit more shallow than BDO in some ways.
I'm fairly concerned with how open the over all layout of freeholds is. They look kind of bloated with far too much space. I think 1 acre could have fit all the structures your example freehold had here. And with that bloated space makes it far more attackable and easy to sneak up and gank people. It's yet another reason we really need security structures in the game as a generality.
You didn't give much of a look at processing so its hard to say if I'm disappointed here. I'll just wait for more information. But you are going to have to explain and do more with processing than 'press e to excite the crafting user base'.
I really like the idea of inns but think they are a solution in search of a problem. The problem is how limited housing is in the first place. Giving people temp houses does almost nothing to benefit and immerse the player. You aren't going to care about 'decorating a hotel room'. It's just there to 'make sure players don't fall behind' and I respect that.
Some of the views in game were gorgeous, it shows me there is potential for the game to look nice if you give your artists a little more freedom to be colorful and stylized.
I liked the slide show. I need you all to do that sort of thing more often as it really helps keep things clear and gets into the important systems design details. And to whichever person kept 'interrupting' with more details and explanations. THANK YOU YOU WERE GREAT KEEP INTERRUPTING TO CLARIFY DESIGNS!