Development Update: July 29, 2022

Discussion & Outline Summary

Community & Reminders

• They are spotlighting a single Youtube comment per development update. 
  • The comment led Steven to explain that there is a system-driven way for players to co-op caravans. There is the driver/owner of the caravan, which preps the caravan for launch at the caravansary, and they can make a selection to allow for designated players or members of his party to reserve space within the caravan, which the player can then upload to the caravan. There can even be an agreement for insurance should the caravan be destroyed. Example: If you are confident in the owner’s ability to deliver your goods, you may not ask for insurance, but if it’s a new owner without a reputation, then you can request insurance (which is a feature that the owner of the caravan can enable) which will have the amount of insurance that will be placed in escrow and given to you should the caravan not make it to its destination, or should the caravan’s goods be lost. 
• Cosmetics swapping over on August 10th, 2022 at 11AM PST.
• Dev Discussion on World Map Discovery is still open on the forum for feedback.

Tech Art Tool Discussion

• Many tools that have been developed/are being developed are meant to create more efficient workflows.
• The Landform tool came about as the team was trying to speed up the process of creating art/the world. Because of how big the world of Verra is, it was decided to create a tool that can help with any art feature. Previously (and in most other games), when building the world you start with 3rd party application, then texturize it on another different application. Jumping from program to program is an interruption in the workflow, which is a constant hindrance to the rhythm of creation. The new tool allows the user to stay in a single engine while creating art and displacing textures into geometry. With the transition to UE5, this single tool is now possible. 
• On the performance side, the tool allows them to grab higher fidelity for geometry and textures.
• This allows the application to be rendered with a lower end PC, ensuring that a high population is possible without a high pay-gate PC.
• Every edit becomes nondestructive, so they can revert it and iterate over it. 
• This tool allows artists to sculpt out a single feature and create variances of it without needing to manually create multiple individual textures and color sets, while still maintaining the handmade look of individual features.

Character Art Update

• Empyrean male and female concept art was shown
• Revised Ren’Kai male and female concept art was show.
• The Guise of the Negotiator (June 2022 – July 2022)
• Lightfoot Leveret (March 2021 – April 2021
• Farm Ducklings 
• Shaded Duckling (July 2021 – Aug 2021)
• Three Tulnar concept arts were shown

Lore

The Tulnar were left behind during the exodus from Vera, and it was very hard to exist for the first several hundred years. And there were a number of minor and major races that all sought refuge within the under realm, with that, there comes different species influence in the race of Tulnar itself and Intrepid wants players to dial up or down those influences as they see fit between the humanoid, the simian, the mammalian, the reptilian influences, and as you dial those things up your base body if it exceeds a certain percentage threshold will assume the form and stance of 1 of 3 primary types of influences that exist for the Tulnar. What was displayed was those 3 influences, you can be 100% in one and you will be very similar to what was shown in the concept, or you can mix and match and you can blend between the different influences. 

Studio Update

• In July they hired 8 people.
• There is a Recruitment Job Scam Advisory PSA.  https://support.ashesofcreation.com/hc/en-us/articles/8151257484435-Recruitment-Job-Scam-Advisory 

Q&A

• Will mobs knockback/down mounted players off their mounts?
  • There is a danger to traversing areas with enemies nearby. There are specific abilities that knock a rider off of their mount should they venture too close to enemies.
• With the recent updates, we’ve seen to combat, has the team decided if there will be a Global Cooldown (GCD) or not? 
  • Yes, but it is something that will be tested in Alpha 2 and how GCD are categorized across different types of abilities. 
• Will there be a cap on how many times an animal can be bred in animal husbandry?
  • Yes, there will be a cap absolutely, that cap is defined by the type of animal the quality of the animal, and for what purpose it is being used in the animal husbandry system.
• Will we be able to fly flags on ships such as coats of arms indicating an association to guilds/nodes or their groups such as pirates?
  • It will not likely be a flag-based system but there will be the opportunity to utilize unique emblems and custom images on their sales as well as certain locations on the haul for names and emblems as a decal. 
• We know that party/raid/guild ally mates can’t flag against each other, but what about if one of them is a PKer, can your guildmate help remove corruption by killing you? 
  • Currently, yes. The affiliation between guilds or citizenships is trumped by your status condition of corrupt and any player can kill a corrupt player but that will also be tested in Alpha 2. Even if you are capable of killing your friends, there are unique abilities in the bounty hunter systems that locate individuals on the map and thus there will always be that tense anxiety as you are facilitating a kill from other players.  
• Will Alpha 2 be feature complete before Betas or Launch?
  • Yes, it will be feature complete before Beta. Beta is mostly to identify last-minute bugs and make sure that everything else is ready for launch. Alpha 2 server will remain even post-launch as a test server.
• Will larger ships have a minimum capacity required in order to be mobile?
  • No, you only need a captain to drive the ship, however, to be effective there is a scaling amount of additional personnel that is required on each ship type/class in order to be most effective, and that scales based on the ship.
• When it comes to castle nodes and castle sieges, are the weekly node events/monthly Castle siege a guarantee? Or is it possible that a siege/Castle node event could have no challengers and they don’t take place?
  • Castle sieges are on a monthly schedule, those sieges will always occur on that schedule. Events and node-based events are predicated on certain world conditions being met. So it is not always guaranteed that a node will suffer some type of event unless a predicate for that particle event or story arc is met within the world.  
• When it comes to mayoral construction projects how long will it take for a node to be built completely?
  • The expected time from node advancement ranges from hours (wilderness to expedition) to weeks (city to metropolis) depending on the level. This is because nodes are the dials in which the world advances.  What it takes for a node to advance within a single level, which includes establishing embassies or relationships with the castles or reputation with other nodes so that trade agreements can be utilized, building new types of player buildings is a very big process. It is one thing to get a node to a certain level, but it is another to develop that node. Because of that, there is no average time because there are so many variables, including how many citizens are there, what’s the type of traffic within the node based on things like tax rate, and building specialization, all of which are variables which can affect the build-out time for a node. If there is a particular project that the citizens want to be developed based on the node stage they should have the ability to complete several of those projects within a single term of a mayor/ The term of the mayor is 1 month. 
• If a martial DPS archetype takes a magical DPS secondary archetype ( for example rogue + mage = nightspell) how will the scaling of that classes DPS/abilities work? Will it scale off of physical stats, magical stats, or both? 
  • Steven decided not to answer this until they have a deeper dive into the combat which will be coming in the next few months
• Will there be an in-game tool to help keep track of where you store items?
  • Absolutely, that is a user experience they don’t want to make cumbersome. They want players to know where things are and then the meaningful thing is traveling to that location to get them, particularly as it relates to material and raw gatherable. One thing that will be included is when you are within a node or an economic region, you can be at a crafting station and have access to pull from your personal storage and warehouse storage at the node, without having to run back and forth.
• During monster coin events, will the hate lists for NPCs restrict the effect the buildings players can target and disable?
  • When events occur there are prescribed and specific objectives that can be targeted. You are not streamlined into one particular, there is an option to choose from, but those are not influenced by any hate list that may be incurred from NPCs. When you are playing as a monster from a monster coin event your focus is on completing objectives that have already been prescribed as part of the event. For example, If the predicate system queued which started an event, a number of spawners activate around the node and NPCs start moving towards the node, and the node is notified, those with monster coins in the area who are not a citizen of the node, or an affiliated node can choose to activate their monster coin to become one of the monster types that exist within that event. That event can have a number of targets such as getting into/disabling the armory, the barracks, and a workshop, when you become the monster, those are your three objectives. You may not need to destroy all three you may just need to destroy one, you may even have targets that are NPCs such as the blacksmith that is at the workbench, the captain of the guard that is at the barracks, or someone else at the armory. 
• Will mobs be able to buff each other when grouped up? 
  • Yes, absolutely. The AI system is extremely versatile which provides the capability of having a scoring system when it comes to the behaviors that the monster is going to utilize, and it can do some of those behaviors in parallel depending on how that scoring system comes out. Part of the interaction that Intrepid wants to have existed between groups of AI or groups of monsters is the ability to support other monster types or classes that might be a part of that social group, not just from a social-aggro perspective, but from a social-support perceptive. 
• With leveling set to take a while, will each level have a reward attached to it? 
  • Yes, there will be something for each level, but some levels will be more momentous than others. But there will not be a draught between leveling process where there is nothing for a level and is not indicative of a good reward or progression system. 

Outline Contributors: Skylarck The Botanist, Simurgh