Talk:2018-09-01 PAX West Panel

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Vertaling

11:05 - Garrett Fuller

Good day everybody, welcome to PAX West.

My name is Garrett Fuller, I work for Critical Hit Consulting, and I'm incredibly lucky to work with people from Intrepid Studios on a little project called Ashes of Creation, that's not little at all.
I will go through our introductions and talk about this esteemed group of gentlemen in front of you who are one of the hardest working teams in games, which makes me really excited and it's great to see that.

So next to me here, he probably has one of the toughest jobs as the lead technical designer, Akil Hooper.
Akil has actually worked on Everquest as well, so he goes in MMOs almost as far as I do, which is great.

Next to me, I am not messing it up this PAX, is Jeff Bard. Jeff is a lead game designer, and he was also a lead game designer on Everquest 2 and several other things.

Next to him is one of my favorite people and I love getting his calls at 7 AM. Don't mind because it's 7 AM East Coast time, which means he's up at 4 AM which, I wish I could do that.
You're an our creative director Steven Sharif and CEO of Intrepid as well. So I'm gonna throw this in - thank you for making MMOs great again.

Next to him is Mat Broome, Mat is your lead character artist. Mat makes sure that all of us look absolutely amazing as our avatars on the screen which i think is also one of the most fun jobs in games.
But he has quite a resume, he's worked on DC Universe, Planetside, H1Z1, a bunch of comics you probably heard of. That's the cool part, right, the comic part.
I'm good at stick figures, Mat, if you ever need someone to do a stick figure artwork.

And last but not least - Michael Bacon who is your environmental artist.
So Michael makes sure that the worlds you see in Ashes of Creation are absolutely stunning and they are and he's worked on, Jesus, everything. I mean, Everquest, Saints Row, lot of things.

So you have this amazing panel, you have this great studio that continues to grow so let's get the quick stuff out of the way, the studio has been growing a lot and tell everybody what you've been growing about, towards. I leave it to you guys.

14:52

Steven Sharif: Well it's been actually really crazy, we were here last year one year ago and today we now have over 100 people on the project and we are growing to 200 people on the project before the end of this year.
So we have ramped up production and speed towards getting you guys the game that you saw the vision for and you signed on for knowing that this is answering the call of many gamers for the past decade that we haven't been able to really see an MMORPG hold the ideals that we want to see in a game.
And it really is so fulfilling to watch over the past year the team grow to the size we are and I mean we're literally bursting at the seams in the office.
We have engineers in France, we have artists in Malaysia, we're now working on the project 24/7 across the globe.

15:48

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah I mean if you think about back in PAX how many people do we have back then it was

Steven Sharif: At PAX I think was like 20 yeah 25 maybe

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah so I mean we've quadrupled in size basically and you can kind of see the results of that and kind of what we've been working on. You know it's been fun it's been trying to integrate everybody into like our way of doing things is challenging but also rewarding you get a lot of buy-in from people who haven't experienced kind of our pace of doing things. Nor our kind of like you know way of getting things done. It's been fun we've got a lot of really cool people: A lot of really smart sharp cats that are all on the project now and-

Steven Sharif: It's actually been really fun watching as we bring new members on board the team that literally the day they sit down in their seat they're producing something [laughter]. The growth has been amazing over the past year.

16:54

Garrett Fuller: I have this image of "Hi. Congratulations welcome to Intrepid Studios, please sit down this is Akil and he's gonna be directing you on how to code."

Jeffrey Bard: That pretty much except for the "Hi. Congratulations" part [laughter].

Garrett Fuller: So what's fascinating and this is an experience I've gone through and I hope maybe some of you have gone through in the audience; but you guys just got back from Germany and Gamescom; and Gamescom is a 400,000 person show I've been there.

Jeffrey Bard: I had no idea how big I was. It was crazy.

Garrett Fuller: Yeah it is a beast of a show. But apparently you had a very successful Gamescom so can you can you tell us a little bit about that?

Steven Sharif: We literally actually decided to go to Gamescom forty-eight hours before the flight left. That was how that was. It was like down to the wire. We- I had I lost my passport too actually and I was like trying to find it and I had to run down to the passport office in San Diego in the middle of the day the day before the flight left and got my passport the same day. It was crazy. But no, we had a very successful Gamescom. I mean every single press interview that we did we were in the business side of things so although the meetings that we had were literally- you could watch as people didn't have any idea what Ashes of Creation was and then their jaw just dropped after they saw the most recent combat footage that we showed; and that was really fun to see their transition because we had the laptop set up with a screen in a room and we would show them first alpha0 foot- well first we'd show them pre-alpha footage, then alpha0 footage and then we'd show the most recent footage and they would literally just, their face would go white. What is this?

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah we would tag-team them and convert them over to our side. We had a lot of influencers come by. We had some fans come by.

Steven Sharif: We got two awards.

Jeffrey Bard: We got two awards: Best online

Steven Sharif: And best independent game.

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah so that was really awesome actually. We didn't expect that at all being kind of in the business section.

Steven Sharif: It was awesome.

18:57

Garrett Fuller: Yeah cool. Now that we got all of the business talk out of the way, let's get to the great part right, which is: What have you guys been doing? Because I think you have some surprises today for the group here at PAX that I don't- even I was getting messages from Steven last night about. I'm like oh okay we're gonna be talking about that. Let's do it. So why don't you guys start and we can go through the whole panel and talk about what you've been doing lately because it's trust me you guys are gonna be jumping out of your seats in about 20 minutes/

Steven Sharif: I think we might have a timeline image that we could probably find that might help kind of set the stage for the process from there to now.

Garrett Fuller: Don't make Peter nervous he's scrambling.

Steven Sharif: I'm sorry.

Jeffrey Bard: We've already changed the format.

Steven Sharif: Off the rails. There it is. There it is. No that's alpha one phase one.

Jeffrey Bard: Here's all the slides.

Steven Sharif: Okay and we're running through slides [cross-talk]. No okay so I mean where we came from and where we are you know in the past really four or five months development has been you know- when the kickstarter ended in June and the summer backing ended in July I believe we went to PAX West. So we came to PAX West we came with a really early build and that was important for us for a few reasons right. Because one you know being a Kickstarter the game can have somewhat of a stigma associated with it because some games kind of go for years and years and years and they don't put anything in the hands of the players to get active feedback to show development process that kind of thing so it was really important for us to come to PAX West a year ago, even if it was such an early build; and yeah that's obviously a two-edged sword because you're dealing with people thinking okay this is what the games gonna look like; and on the flip side you know you want that feedback and design features that we're implementing in the backend that we're building.

Jeffrey Bard: And we also want to establish that trust right. Like we are working on stuff hard for you guys and it's not really fair to hide that from you right or to keep that from you; and because of that stigma with Kickstarter it was really important to like: Here take it we're doing stuff.

Steven Sharif: Exactly so that's what we came to PAX West last year, we had that of that PAX build.

Jeffrey Bard: So there was like one boss in that. There were four classes. There was a couple skills.

Steven Sharif: No progression. No persistence yet. You know you're just kind of running through and getting a feel for the world and what the games all about and just kind of showing the players and stuff. So that took us what four or five months?

Jeffrey Bard: No that took us three- two and a half months.

Steven Sharif: I'm sorry that was two and a half months. Then we built from there to alpha 0, which we released December 15th and we had 2,500 testers; and that was a huge jump from PAX to Alpha-0. That's where we implemented our launcher. We had the backend systems. We had progression. We had persistence to level 10. We had four archetype classes available. We had over a hundred skills available. We had 27 monsters in the zone. We had a 16 square kilometer map, which was roughly the size of Skyrim. We had seven dungeons. We had two main bosses. We had a bunch of storylines.

Jeffrey Bard: We had a functioning node system.

Steven Sharif: The node system was functional collecting experience: Progression to stage three. Showing the base designs of the game. Literally built you know within less than six months.

Jeffrey Bard: So that was all of our core systems; all of our back-end a lot of that stuff going on; and again it was a technical test mostly but we wanted to really kind of test all of our design philosophies like in a live environment with actual players and not just on a whiteboard.

Akil Hooper: And plus we need to stuff to test right. We need things to happen when you push buttons.

Steven Sharif: Yes absolutely; and then the other key point from there was that you know putting that out in the hands again, getting feedback from 2,500 testers; and you know we didn't spend a lot of time on the combat that was not our primary focus. But obviously that two-edged sword came by just a little bit where people said hey this combat looks bad. You know it doesn't look fun, it's too slow. It's all you know just feedback that we knew we were going to spend time on but the player didn't necessarily know; or at least some percentage of them didn't. So our next step was okay let us- our next milestone was alpha 1; and alpha 1 you know we obviously wanted to have one quarter of the map size. We wanted to have all the base archetype classes available. We wanted to have persistence and progression to level 20. We wanted to have a lot of things there. But we decided because of a player feedback and wanting to see us doubling down and focusing on development of combat that we were going to add an additional phase to alpha one; and that's what we announced at PAX East was that we're splitting out the one into two phases. So those people who had access to alpha one now we're going to see the first phase, which is purely dedicated to focusing on action combat: Getting that system nailed down because from the very beginning our combat system was always approached as this is going to be a hybrid combination of action and tab. We're going to give players the agency to kind of dictate in their skill tree the ability to either spec into action-oriented skills or tab oriented skills; and we knew from a design standpoint that that's probably going to be the most difficult system to nail because: One it's the most tactile. Two it's the most interacted with on the players behalf; and then three if that system doesn't feel good then the rest of the game is really having a problem. So we created a whole new phase that we were going to introduce that was just going to focus on- and there's a lot of systems that go into the phase one that are just don't relate to act to combat actually: There is the matchmaking process for in the in-game arena system. There is the server architecture that needs to get set up to host a bunch of- there's the live game ops that's going to be present. There is the production of many skills. There's the projectile based systems. There's the raycast that need to be completed. There's the whole character art pipeline; the environment art pipeline. Building that world there's a lot of stuff outside of just the action combat actually that goes into making that phase one. Because we want it to be fun. We want it to be presentable. We also want it to be a good time for for people who are helping us test that.

Jeffrey Bard: And it's also an extension of our alpha zero test right; where in terms of like we want to get a bunch of people in one small area and just wreck our servers as hard as we can right. So like it's a way for us to like quickly get people in right, keep them engaged doing a lot of stuff on the server and then seeing what the results are and trying to increase that number because at the end of the day we want these castle sieges to be really huge events and the only way to get to that point is to really you know see where our limits are and fix those limits and try to keep increasing the number of people we can put in one small area.

25:50

Steven Sharif: Yeah right; and in fact you know since we're on the subject of art a little bit we can actually probably touch on you know what that process is because as design is iterating art just keeps chugging along. That's a train that doesn't stop.

Jeffrey Bard: Has everybody's seen the most recent action combat video? So you'll notice there was a huge upgrade in what the game looked like right; and a lot of that is is these guys's responsibility. You know obviously it's a game that's in production, so stuff like this is always going to continue to improve but you know in the last four months the difference between where we came from and where we are now is just massive.

Garrett Fuller: So Mat do you want to talk us through some of the pictures and weapons.

Mat Broome: Yeah I mean a lot of the slides that we decided to bring here they do- they go all the way back to PAX West you know and where we are now. But more importantly all the weapons and stuff you guys are seeing and all the armor that you guys are seeing from the wand to the sceptre they kind of speak to what Steven and Jeffrey are talking about, which is everything is not only scalable by progression, but it's also scalable by customization. So our challenge was to get all the benchmark testing that we needed to have done the scale because I mean MMOs are all about scaling everything you know in a constant progression: Just scale eventually up to level 50 and higher, so our whole focus was getting this stuff to work technically at PAX West last year. So this huge jump in detail and fidelity that you guys are seeing skills all the way up you know not only in our test you know environment, but it also scales all the way up to the larger you know product a couple years, so.

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah I mean the goal is kind of to do like have every piece feel like a one-off piece but not actually create it that way right.

Mat Broome: Yeah I mean everybody kind of you know- all MMOs kind of start with your T-shirt and pants right; and then from there you start making all these decisions about how you want to look unique in the world; and one of the things I've talked about on all the projects I work with this people really kind of fall in love with these early pre-vis images but really MMO players get in in the first thing they do is have a sense of uniqueness to the way that they look. So you know my job really and Michael's job is make sure that everything you see is customizable, everything is modular, everything can grow in scale so that the players make the final decision really on what they look like you know regardless of you know how they're playing the game. So these are by far the most complex armor sets- and just the kind of level set the character team- Chris Myers is one of the animators and I think he nailed it when he said we're putting together the Navy SEALs with character teams. I think the average experience on the character team is about 13 years of MMO. It is not the average-

Steven Sharif: Put it in perspective: Mat was former art director on H1Z1, EverQuest, DC Universe [cross-talk].

Mat Broome: So these characters have on average even at their a base look about 11 pieces of customizable detail and that scales up to as many as 27 pieces; and that's at level 10 and 20. So the amount of modular sets is amazing and more importantly, even the combat video that some of you guys saw: The key to that is that those are real game assets. They're not demo assets. These aren't fakey assets. They're running through a character pipeline. It's the same pipeline we will scale up. It's all real, so we're not just hitting the shows like gamescom. This is in the most literal sense: We log in through the client. We get onto the server. We play-test for real. That's unusual for an MMO within a year. We're usually running off of a local dev box and coming up with these simulated situations. Steven's thing from day one has been for real all the time. Client for real all the time. Security check for real when you get in the server.

Steven Sharif: That's because as a player going through previous alphas and betas of different games I hated seeing something on the screen and then logging in and experiencing something completely different.

Mat Broome: And we'll tell Steven: No Steven, usually that's like 18 months out. He goes no no no no no no no. We do it for real. Take the time. As a player I got- this drove me crazy when I was 10 years old; and he just goes off about this all the time. So he got the right collective you know skillset and talent in there, but the the objective all the time is to run through all the systems, all the security checks, you know and stop off points to the server with real content going through real pipelines. So like some of the stuff you guys are- so for instance like this right here is the orb. So you guys have seen like way early on even in our Kickstarter you saw her running around with the orb and the book so we're really showing a progression you know a year at PAX that all these real game assets have made in a short amount of time.

Akil Hooper: And one of the thing Mat's doing for us is really great is all- he said modular kind of blew by it, but all these pieces can be put together to make like hundreds of very unique, very heroic looking sets right. So you're not gonna be running around in the world and seeing a bunch of people who look just like you. You'll really be able to customize yourself and search for something that reflects the way you want to look and you want to play, you want to feel when you're running around the world.

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah and when he says hundreds of looks that's just right now. That's with the base sets that we have right now. Yeah you know when we launch it's gonna probably be in the millions right [cross-talk].

Mat Broome: At the base level right now there are 21 base level sets. If you add in material offsets and combos it literally scales to over 5,000.

Jeffrey Bard: Right now.

Garrett Fuller: I was trying to do that murder in my head and I'm like [cross-talk].

Steven Sharif: The reason for that is is it's I mean yes it's difficult to do that. It is a lot of work to do that but from a player's perspective the ability to capitalize on the RPG element of the MMORPG to define a unique look on behalf of your character is something I know I've always wanted to see. I don't like walking around in a world and seeing cookie cutter set after cookie cutter set. I want to see customizable aspects of those attachments, those unique filigrees, those defining features of a set that's available to the player to dictate.

Mat Broome: This is what's fun. This is one of my my most fun things. This is my favorite project I've ever done and I'm not just saying that cuz Steven's sitting here [laughter]. Even if he didn't sign my checks I would say this. But the best part about Ashes and this is sincere: So normally work at video game companies everyone's kind of overthinking the process because they're not thinking about it as a fan; and when you're doing like you know the base looks- the t-shirt and pants- you constantly get this from your creative director: Well we don't want that to look too cool. Steven is a total opposite: Shoot for the moon. Make it ridiculously badass. Go way farther, no even the base t-shirt and pants will look amazing high fantasy. It's always a theme, so the artists have this incredible sense of autonomy to go upstairs; and on this project the artists design the aesthetics for the armor.

Jeffrey Bard: The artists are literally upstairs.

Mat Broome: And you just get to blow it out and just keep pushing it farther and farther. So me and Steven kind of established this agreement: I'll push it too far. You tell me when to come back.

Steven Sharif: To be fair I have had to say a couple times come back.

Mat Broome: Never tell an artist to just go to the moon.

Steven Sharif: Now just to be clear you know that obviously that's the progression there from start to finish is still a relevant and uniquely defined one. You will know who's in a starter set and who is in the most badass-

Jeffrey Bard: But you shouldn't look like a popper when you start on day one.

Steven Sharif: Exactly. You are a hero who has literally stepped through the divine gateway into a world of complete darkness and treachery and you are here to set things right and build civilization again. That's a heroic person.

Akil Hooper: Yeah you are already a hero when you arrive.

Steven Sharif: Absolutely.

33:55

Garrett Fuller: Awesome. So speaking of worlds of darkness and treachery.

Jeffrey Bard: Darkness and poetry.

Garrett Fuller: I actually thought it would be great to have Michael talk about some of the worlds that he's building and then we'll bring it over to Akil to see how he keeps up with you guys on the technical side and and continues to follow the timeline. So Mike why don't you tell us a little bit about your environments that you're creating in this heroic world.

Michael Bacon: Well this is where we basically started from Alpha-0. So as you can see it's pretty rough; and then we knew going on early on that we're gonna have to build some really really big stuff, so a lot of it was just basically building in the pipelines in order to you know do things a little bit more modularly; and put together processes and things so we can actually be able to build things that you could scale you know for like our dynamic world that we're creating. So in this Alpha-1 we have here if we focused on kind of three sort of race environment types, which is like the human the elves and this tribal sort of set; and yeah so basically as the nodes progress we're kind of like trying to like- I was trying to basically make a progression of sort of tech mobile you know when it goes from like like the humans to say- so like humans will start with their housing and stuff and there'll be more Western sort of influence like Old West almost styling; and then it would sort of like branch off into you know castles that were a little bit more the classical style; and then like as they sort of progressed into Metro you know they would like kind of move into more of a gothic kind of direction. So and yeah so basically you know it kind of gives you a sense of like progression as the nodes are progressing up as far as tech level and everything and yeah; and then like on the-

Steven Sharif: The important part of this you know is from an art perspective not just character, but environment as well, is that modular capability of the building the world around you- both from character and environment- allows for such diverse landscapes that are actually capable of being built into a production worthy pipeline that's going to deliver on a timely time right. That the key is you want to achieve the best in an acceptable time period.

Michael Bacon: That's exactly it. You've got X amount of time-

Steven Sharif: Absolutely. So I think for Alpha-1 and the environment that we've built for this alpha-1 phase 1 testing period, you know, we now have actually buildable buildings that are now capable to the players as well; and that has a variety of modular tools [cross-talk]. Right yeah and then we have three castle sets that are building castles that you built, that John built recently; and then the old metropolis one; and you'll see that here in a gameplay video we're going to show shortly. But you know

Michael Bacon: Well we also came into a little problem we had the building would be destructible. That brought a whole other [cross-talk]. So a lot of the development was like trying to get that to work and like how are we going to put that together; and so in the modular you know way that we were building stuff we also had to accommodate all that kind of thing. So then when we make the world you know things we can actually go and collapse this stuff in the end.

Mat Broome: Yeah those are highly difficult things to do all in parallel to each other; and so we'll be playtesting every single night.

Steven Sharif: I kind of threw that on them I think in the last like month and a half: The destructible part. Because I think we were working under the assumption that the terrain assets were not gonna be destructible for phase one, you know wasn't in part of that deadline. But we had one of our engineers actually was able to achieve in a much shorter time period.

Jeffrey Bard: We thought it was gonna take a long time to develop this system and then it ended up taking like a couple of days.

Steven Sharif: I think it was like two days [cross-talk].

Michael Bacon: We're in the meeting and we're talking about it and Kevin was basically telling us how it was gonna take like a month [cross-talk]. He literally went to his desk and had like something up and running for destroying pieces in like it was a half hour [laughter].

Steven Sharif: So now when I heard that we had something up and running that's what I was like all right producers add it to the schedule. It's in phase one.

Michael Bacon: But then it was actually having to go back to all the assets we'd already created and trying to retrofit all that [cross-talk].

Steven Sharif: Yeah bacon stepped up and said okay this blueprint's working then we can start retrofitting all the buildings.

Michael Bacon: Exactly. Exactly.

Jeffrey Bard: And one of the cool things too is about these modular systems right: It's really easy to kind of make the assumption that modularity ends up feeling generic, but that's really kind of not the case in this product. The modularity gives us a chance to make every kind of place feel like it has its own character.

Mat Broome: And I mean that's really the thing. It really is the artist challenge is that you really have to plan your assets years ahead and you also have to plan the design changes in a way where you don't gate the designers at all. So you're you know always think of it from the standpoint you're building this massive freeway system. You don't really know where all the stop signs are. You just know people need to get on and get off and you have to plan that like way ahead, because you don't want the designers to ever feel like- you never really want to tell designers no. You always kind of want to give them three options you know to get home. So I think what is the most challenging in our world, with our teams, really is getting them to really shoot for the moon now but understand ultimately we have to finish at Jupiter three years from now. So the modular stuff definitely is always like you know where do we build the freeway system and get the game done and get it working at a decent framerate.

39:51

Garrett Fuller: It's totally true. So how do you support these guys? I mean that's a- talking about oh we got this destructible system up in 30 minutes it's great; and but you're the one that's got to crack that code?

Akil Hooper: My primary goal is to take the things that they want to do and make sure that designers can do it quickly and efficiently right. So like the destructible things: Sure everything is destructible but now designers don't want to place every single destructible asset and make it destructible and associate with a building right and so-

Jeffrey Bard: It would take us so long.

Akil Hooper: Yeah so you have to build a system so like everything inside the building destructs when the building destruct right. So the table blows up when the wall blows up or floor blows up; and say so yeah there's work on the back end to make sure that's all scalable and fast and efficient and doesn't break every third time. But then aside from that, it's it's taking a lot of this stuff that's in our imagination and making it work right. So Steven has an idea like ah I want you to be able to have a shield that grows you and get behind it and you hide and projectiles will bounce off; and we'll be like oh god.

Steven Sharif: Shield hype.

Akil Hooper: Yeah okay. It's working it's not in the video but it's working.

Mat Broome: This is a very recent conversation by the way.

Akil Hooper: That was a fun conversation have with Mat was like you want the shield to do what?

Mat Broome: I mean this is this is why I love doing the panels with these guys. He's laughing for a reason is because design has all these amazing ideas; and this goes back again to not really saying no because ultimately saying no to designers means there's something that you guys aren't gonna get yeah right. So they come upstairs and like oh we have the shield that transforms and it flies up in air - I might be exaggerating - but it does all these crazy things; and I go what? And it turns into this huge meeting of Akil talking about the technical design of it and then it comes down to okay well we have to make this work with 21 armor sets. So Interpred what I love is it moves at a different speed and then because of our transparency you guys can you know see like in today's video. Just keep in mind like one year ago we were all together and one year ago this is where the game is now.

Jeffrey Bard: One year ago we had a demo.

Steven Sharif: You're about to see the difference.

Mat Broome: The conversations that we're having up here, they lend a lot to the speed that we work at; but what's great about this is - and this is the most sincere thing I can say: We don't get in conflicts, we literally will talk through; and Jeff is always the referee because you are.

Jeffrey Bard: I'm the center.

Mat Broome: Jeff is always the one that goes guys listen to each other. Gals listen to the guys; and we will go back and forth that real-time and figure it out all in like a an impromptu standing circle and everybody scatters back to their desk and within days tries to get the stuff in. It's a very very fast-moving, but it but it works.

42:37

Garrett Fuller: I'm curious Akil: What's one of your phases because it's- you talk about the last year; and again the pace that these guys work at; and I think part of it's the design philosophy Steven that you put forth in terms of producing content. But what was a highlight for you on the technical side to see the imaginations of these guys come together and you go yeah?

Akil Hooper: Well my. Getting invisibility working it seemed like it should have been a very easy thing but it just ballooned out into a million different problems and getting that all working again was pretty awesome. Yeah there are a couple other abilities that were like there were just a beast; and just solving all those problems and seeing them actually functioning and and not spitting out errors and crashing the server is always just a good feeling.

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah you wouldn't think it would be hard to you know be invisible, swap weapon, have that weapon be invisible; but it's actually a really difficult problem.

Akil Hooper: Yeah and make sure everyone sees you invisible and sees your weapon invisible-

Steven Sharif: The great thing is that you know our design team Akil and and Jeff and they're supported by a really strong engineering team. They're not here, but we do love them; and you know whenever there's something that can't be solved by a designer they only need to turn their head and say okay you need to code this.

Jeffrey Bard: Kevin.

Steven Sharif: They're like beep beep beep boop boop.

43:53

Garrett Fuller: So you talk a little bit about the timeline you guys been working with. We've talked about the you know milestones that we have here.

Steven Sharif: We should have one timeline for sure. We can bring up the alpha one phase one timeline. Can we do that? Any of our timelines.There we go okay. So yeah talking a little bit about the phases of alpha one: Again phase one is is really a phase that we we kind of pivoted towards of the alpha one.

Jeffrey Bard: PvP and action combat it's really what we want to focus on.

Steven Sharif: And really nailing down the matchmaking aspects of it. Do we want to go to the video?

Jeffrey Bard: Yes.

Steven Sharif: I'm gonna interpret their thought. We're gonna go- okay do we have- can we just as a reference point, can we show last year combat. I know it's only like 10 seconds worth but just to preface this.

[Music]

Steven Sharif: Just put that in your mind for a moment before you're about to see the new hotness.

Jeffrey Bard: Internalize it.

Steven Sharif: I just wanted just to give you a reference point of what- because I'm gonna tell you something as a player: You don't see stuff like that usually from studios because it's dangerous. It literally is dangerous because in the studio's they're looking at it like: look at what we've accomplished in this short period of time. This took a few weeks or a month or something. We got combat working. Right and excited; and let's show the community the progress; and the communities like NO! This looks like crap! Game dead on arrival! Like they don't understand you know generally what the process is because typically studios don't show the process. They show a final product a month out from beta and then hype hype marketing marketing and go; and then it's a flash fire. So you know that's typically what how it works.

Jeffrey Bard: Can we see it again? I really want to see it again.

Garrett Fuller: You really want to do that to Steven? Jeff you said it. Okay ready I'll shout cast it. Stop! Go!

Steven Sharif: It hurts my soul.

Garrett Fuller: No stop! No wait go! Pace up!

Steven Sharif: Look at that skeleton.

Jeffrey Bard: Skeleton was cool.

Steven Sharif: Okay. So now what we're gonna show you has been a little under four months of work on the combat side. Just under four months of work.

Jeffrey Bard: It's basically the end of alpha zero.

Steven Sharif: This is the end of alpha zero till now; and you know you're- as I said the art train never stops. You're going to see supreme advances just in the environment and the character pipeline and the weapons and whatnot; and then you're gonna see pure action combat that we will eventually integrate into the combat system. So let's take a look at that new video. Let's get that music up.

[Music] [Applause]

50:26

Garrett Fuller: You know what's great about that reaction is the two split seconds pause before the clap, because you're like... Oh I gotta clap now. That is insane. Thank you all. I am very curious. I have a very quick question: You guys worked on EverQuest and I don't know how many people in the room go back that far in MMOs? Means a lot of us right? What's it like to see this level of advancement in combat in speed and visceral experience for you guys as designers?

Jeffrey Bard: Sometimes we- I mean back in the day we never thought stuff like this was possible. Like in terms of eh this is- these are systems that we really can't touch because that's not what an MMO is and this is not something that we can do technologically. Like it's too hard to have this kind of pace. So yeah I mean it's- I feel like we're breaking barriers with what we're doing right now.

Akil Hooper: It's great to not have sacred cows right. Like to do not- to just be able to play with things and see what feels good and go with what feels good, rather than have conventions that we need to stick with.

Mat Broome: Yeah Akil just totally nailed it. I mean go back even a conversation earlier working with Stephen: Because of how Stephen interacts with you guys in Discord at the you know owner executive, all things level is so unusual. So the influence that the audience has with Stephen as a fan first and a player, it's just different. So instead of like you know Akil was saying with these white elephants: Steven is emotional about you know since he's played games as at 7 years old; and the limits he wants to push. So even just for me seeing the fidelity that you're able to do in Unreal Engine and the size of the worlds and the fact that we- and without naming certain EverQuest products-

Jeffrey Bard: Like EverQuest?

Mat Broome: The one specifically. We never could get things like the underrealm to work. So what stands out to - and I see you nodding your head - so what stands out to me is we couldn't get him to work at other places, but they're working now right. So from a technological standpoint what we're able to do in a very short amount of time using a really superior engine and giving these talented people the tools, it just changes everything.

Jeffrey Bard: Also keep in mind like all that stuff was live. Like that was all us playing.

Mat Broome: It's a recorded game.

Steven Sharif: It was literally every single scene you saw there was recorded on Thursday; and then it was cut together yesterday [laughter].

Mat Broome: Yesterday into the next day.

Steven Sharif: Intrepid speed.

Garrett Fuller: No in truth and I'll say this-

Mat Broome: Are we done yet Steven? No do it again.

Steven Sharif: It was dropboxed I think at 2:00 in the morning this morning [laughter].

53:11

Garrett Fuller: I got your text. Seriously though as fans and I think this is true: Thank you for live gameplay and not some crazy cinematic to try to sell us. Like I think we as gamers we know right, we're not playing in a cinematic. That looks awesome and that's- the visual effects are just unbelievable. Make you feel epic right? That's the new tagline: Make you feel Epic.

Steven Sharif: Yeah absolutely. I mean you know talking a little back for a second. The engine itself I know there was a lot of of flack we got early on about you know Unreal is not a capable MMORPG engine. But the bottom line is: It is.

Jeffrey Bard: It is if you have the right engineers.

Steven Sharif: Absolutely; and the benefit of Unreal not only is Epic support but also the ability for our engineers to get into the source code of that and make what needs to work for our game work. That's why you know talking a little bit about phase one: Oh let's go back to the timeline. Maybe we pull that timeline back up. So we'll give you a little details on phase one. The first of it- it's not up here actually the first thing should be the battlegrounds. So when we- oh we have actually another announcement as well: We will begin testing for phase one starting with a select number of alpha-1 backers that we will randomly select and include. This is our stress test phase; and that will begin this week. So I just want you guys to know that: One if you're not an alpha one tester make sure to give some big props to alpha one testers, because they're going to be going through some serious testing; and that serious testing might be sitting at the launcher or might be sitting at the lobby and waiting for a game for hours.

Akil Hooper: We should put the windmill monster back in just in case.

Steven Sharif: The windmill monster we should totally do yeah. That testing we're going to start stress testing the server's. We're going to get matchmaking up and running. We have some new UI that we've just saw there a little bit; and the first- so we're able to bring this alpha 1 testing to you guys early- A whole quarter- than what we actually put in our roadmap. Early. Now I don't know how many developments you guys follow from MMORPGs perspective but the term early is very rarely heard; and one thing I love about this team and just the absolute speed, dedication, commitment of the veteran knowledge, experience that's on the team we've been able to pull together is what allows us to to bring something early; and it feels good to actually make a commitment and arrive earlier than expected; and I hope it feels good for you guys too.

56:11

Steven Sharif: But so we have three different modes that will be present in alpha 1 phase 1: The first mode is going to be a battlegrounds. A last-man-standing mode. and that's going to have a hundred players on a map. It's going to have a lot of high octane energy and activity. It's going to be very streamable. It's going to be no NDA. There's going to be a lot of different weapons and skills that were going to be testing. Each of the weapons and armor that you can find in the world are going to have unique spells and skills associated with them that interact with the terrain from a defensive standpoint, from a utility standpoint, from an offensive standpoint. It's going to be able for you to build buildings, complete structures, watchtowers and defensive pillboxes type structures: Arcane structures. You're going to have a lot of fun activity there.

Steven Sharif: The second mode we we'll be implementing, which- is there a timeline on this one? Yeah there we go. The testing for the castle siege mode will begin near the end of December. The castle siege mode is going to start with a 100 versus 100 player map. You're going to be defenders versus the attackers. You're going to have a large destructible castle you're going to have siege weaponry that's deployable can be piloted by the players. There will be a guild mode where you can queue into the matchmaking process with twenty total players so you will have guild systems in place.

Steven Sharif: Account management systems is completely revamped and will be launched I believe on October 5th right?

Jeffrey Bard: October 5th is the the plan currently.

Steven Sharif: The plan currently for our new account management system: You're going to see the ability to make friends, to create guilds there. You're going to have objective based components to the castle siege system. Defenders will have key strategic objectives to maintain and attackers will have destroy key strategic objectives to swing the battle in their favor.

Steven Sharif: Additionally there- you're going to have class kits. This is where we will introduce class kits into the matchmaking system. So you're going to have the traditional trinity type class kits that are going to be present representing different skills that will be present eventually in the MMORPG; and then the other thing- the last mode that will be available; and you saw actually in this video for the first time I think since we first even showed the monster coin system back over a year ago before Kickstarter. You saw players playing as monsters.

Steven Sharif: In the Ashes of Creation Apocalypse horde mode you will be able to play on the Horde side as monsters as well as defending a city with 50 cooperative players in the center of a city or castle against different waves of monsters; and then eventually bosses, where you'll begin to test boss mechanics. You'll have additional features that are going to be present: Co-op objectives. Waves being more difficult than the previous. You're going to have the boss mechanics and legendary creatures available and merchant systems where you're gonna collect the loot and goods from the waves that you destroy and then purchase and upgrade items and gear and whatnot for your character.

Steven Sharif: So you know this phase was as we said added as a separate phase to alpha one as a complementary bonus phase to alpha one; and the reason for that is because we had the ability to test systems that exist separate from the traditional persistent MMORPG server that has progression and levels and whatnot, because we really wanted to nail down the action side of things and we could do so with testing our passive siege mechanics; testing our monster coin system; testing live account operations.

Jeffrey Bard: Yeah it's basically just getting all the players into one spot so we can just iterate over and over and over again. All these matches are gonna be generating lots of data for us and we can use that data to really refine what we're doing when we get to alpha 2.

Steven Sharif: Absolutely.

Akil Hooper: I also want to say we've been playing it every day in the office for like basically three months; and it's a lot of fun. Like we hear people yelling across the office at each other. We all know who the best players are and who to look out for.

Steven Sharif: Wait do we all know who is the best players?

Akil Hooper: Erik, Ryan and Mc P.

Steven Sharif: I thought I was the best player [laughter].

Akil Hooper: Top five.

Steven Sharif: Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.

1:00:37

Garrett Fuller: What's great; and I have to iterate 'cause we talked about this right before the panel: So most people out there on the show floor are gonna be like let's go create a game and make a battle royale game because there happens to be some popular ones right now maybe right. You guys said let's take this mode, let's test it and let's make it part of our MMO, but let's give it to our fans early so that they can actually use this and we can use the data; but they can have a good time while we're building out our full scope world; And you say like a hundred last-man-standing total win fantastic design. 100 vs. 100 castle siege. I'm in that goes back to my old school Dark Age of Camelot days. I want to be part of that fight right; and then you go Ashes of Creation Apocalypse horde mode and go wait I can play a monster and defend this crazy place against a bunch of players and make their lives miserable. Awesome! I'm in on that and I can do one of those any night I want. Like it's not- but the beauty of your product; and this is where I think really Intrepid is going to really truly break the ground it's that that's all going to be one game as an MMO; and I think that's the part that we all love is MMO players.

Steven Sharif: There's more actually though. So the more side of that thing is: So each of these modes in alpha one phase one right- oh did we bring up the phase two? I'm sorry before we get into the phase one different aspects let's bring up the timeline- the next one. There should be one more. There we go okay so alpha one phase two. So phase two begins in the beginning of second quarter of next year; and Phase two is the more traditional alpha that everyone signed up for alpha one. That is going to be where we integrate action combat into the tab targeted systems. You'll have progression to level 20. You will- nodes will be fully featured and progressed to stage three. Stage three is when most of the systems come online for node development: That's where you can declare citizenship. That's where player government happens. That's where building of housing and freeholds become a thing. We have four out of our nine races will be available. All eight base class archetypes will be available. We will have a character creation suite that will be implemented- actually the character creation suite we're hoping to implement in phase one of alpha one. 25% of the total world space will be implemented and playable. So that's roughly 120 square kilometers- that is a significant size of a world; and then we will have two to three servers that are available. We have just under ten thousand testers for alpha one; and then alpha two testing will begin in the beginning of third quarter of next year. Alpha 2 is will have more details on that but it's going to be a much closer to complete situation for the MMO.

Steven Sharif: Now here's the exciting news for alpha 1 phase 1. Because this was a bonus phase what we're going to be doing is with these three modes of gameplay in alpha 1 phase 1 there will be roughly a little bit of a over a month testing period where alpha 1 testers will test each mode; and then we will open up the phase 1 to every registered account on Ashes of Creation. We hope to see over [applause] thank you. So our alpha 1 testers are going to be testing each of these phase. They'll have roughly about four months worth of pre-testing time where it's just alpha one testers and then we want to hit those servers as hard as we can with as many possible people as we can because we know that Ashes of Creation as an MMORPG is going to be one of the largest MMORPGs that is ever going to be launched. We have a lot of pre signed up people. More so when you compare to other products that have launched in the past, the sheer support for a subscription-based non pay2win MMORPG is huge; and we are really excited about that because this is the direction we feel that the genre should be moving in; and I think we've turned some heads for some notable companies- some large publishers- towards this direction away from a free-to-play pay2win cash grab model; and that was our objective ever from the beginning, was to really show that the community has been shrinking because we've had these types of games rammed down our throats and that's not what people want.

Jeffrey Bard: It's not that MMOs are dying, it's that the the monetization scheme is dying, so.

Steven Sharif: Absolutely it is dead. So we're excited about that. Now here's the cool thing: We will be implementing in alpha 1 a phase 1 character creation suite and housing suite as well where you'll be able to earn in the phase 1, the matchmaking system, you'll be able to earn cosmetics. You'll be able to share everything you earn there in the MMORPG when it launches; and the arena system will persist post-launch as well. So this will be an all-action based arena that exists side-by-side with Ashes of Creation as a mode that players will get to plan and earn unique cosmetics in; and they'll be able to build a home starting in phase 1 as well. That will probably come in the horde mode stage, near the end of the horde mode the housing and the character creation suite. You'll be able to build a character, you'll be able to save that character and use that character for the MMORPG; and you'll be able to set your furniture and housing condition in phase 1.

Jeffrey Bard: Yep. That's a lot of work.

Steven Sharif: Pretty excited about that.

1:06:12

Garrett Fuller: Did you guys get all that? You realize where we're going right? That was really good Steven by the way. So I mean at the end of the day the action combat video just surmises what we're all hoping for. You're adding in a great mode in the arena mode that's going to allow all of us have a great time; and then and then we're building out an amazing world that we're all gonna be able to share; and thank you for being a fan first and a designer later. No offense to the designers in the room. But it's true and to kind of touch on- you made a point earlier when you're a kid and you see something, playing any game or watching a movie, you want to be that and you're like why do I have to be this? Why can't I be Darth Maul right? Why can't I be Darth Vader? Why do I have to be Luke Skywalker and I think that's the part of how you put these things into games. Is that funny?

Steven Sharif: I'm sorry I'm a Star Trek fan [laughter].

Garrett Fuller: Hang on a minute.

Steven Sharif: I think on Halloween he came with a lightsaber and I gave him a combadge... There are four lights. There are four lights.

Garrett Fuller: But it's true you want to see you see these amazing creations and you want to play them; and I think that's the best part of Ashes is that you're building a game with that philosophy at its core. So jeez you got a lot this roadmap.

Steven Sharif: This is my dream come true and my endeavor is to make sure that it's your guys's dreams come true as well.

Garrett Fuller: Awesome. Do we really have time for questions?

Jeffrey Bard: We really don't.

Steven Sharif: We could maybe take just maybe two questions.

Garrett Fuller: Two questions. If somebody there's a microphone.

Steven Sharif: If we have any super pressing questions, first to the mic!

Garrett Fuller: Go ahead, go ahead.

1:08:06

Zekethephoenix: Hey Stephen.

Steven Sharif: Hello friend.

Zekethephoenix: I think you know who I am.

Steven Sharif: Yes. Zeekey.

Zekethephoenix: It's Zeke, but I can buy you a pronunciation book maybe down the street. My guildies want to know, let's see, how will raiding be balanced around both action combat and tab target without making one superior to the other?

Garrett Fuller: Oh good question.

Steven Sharif: It's a great question and you know to preface that before I hand it off to Jeff and Akil, is that balance- I mean us as gamers we know that balance is probably the most difficult design aspect right. I mean

Jeffrey Bard: Especially for an MMO because it's so big.

Steven Sharif: Right because there's so many players. There's so many different permeations of class combinations that can be present especially when you're involving you know skill tree that players can spec into individually and make combos that try to break the system or whatever this deal may be. But the to answer I mean the short answer to your question is testing. The short answer is testing. We have a lot of testing phases. The reason why phase one will be moved into from alpha-1 testers to opening up to everyone that's registered right now is because we want to see every possible combination of skill from an action standpoint; and then the reason why we have now over 40,000 people who are signed up for alphas and betas is because we want that testing phase to give us a lot of data; and with that data is what we use to balance right. I mean we set the stage first but.

Akil Hooper: The even shorter answer to it: Perfectly it'll be perfectly balanced first time out [laughter]. So what we hope is to build lots of knobs into the system right. Like lots of places where we can tune and balance it and figure out kind of what the right thing is. Because obviously that's a hard thing right is to make sure that someone who can dodge has it doesn't have too much an advantage over someone who can tab target them right; and it is not something that we think is going to be easy, but we need to we need to have people in there. We need to have people testing it and and we need to get it wrong right and then we'll find out how to get it right. So we don't have a great answer because we don't we haven't found that answer yet but we will find it in playtesting.

Jeffrey Bard: The way we approach it is it's basically two different philosophies: One is like a slower tactical way of fighting and the other one is kind of like a more frenetic strategic way of fighting right; and so we're trying to give like roles to both in order to make that make more sense right, where you might bring somebody who is purely tab targeting and somebody who is purely action-based and they fill a role with that. So that's kind of how we're approaching it philosophically, but of course like when the rubber hits the road everything is going to change and explode. So that's what we're prepared for and that's what we're planning for.

1:10:58

Garrett Fuller: Are you ready I'm going to switch with a warp drive question. Go ahead real fast.

How in depth do you plan on having the character creator in terms of like temp character templates like just faces, or you're gonna be able to fully mold the face like it's clay?

Steven Sharif: So there's a few things. One, well actually Mat why don't you grab that? This is character creation. How intense will it be?

Mat Broome: I'll be real quick but basically from you know facial feature customization, hair color design, facial hair right because we have Dwarves, Orcs, Tulnar and a lot coming so we have to go from you know pedestrial to bestial: All of it.

Steven Sharif: It's gonna be very in-depth I mean-

Jeffrey Bard: We'll probably have presets for everybody just to make it easy to get in the game, but you'll have all the knobs and dials that you probably expect and then some.

Mat Broome: I mean it's just if you look at the number of modular pieces on the character like we're talking about earlier, the number of pieces that are built: That lends itself to hair region of the face: Super complex. Super complex.

Jeffrey Bard: I think that's it.

1:12:00

Garrett Fuller: Yeah, guys you want to be around for a little bit outside?

Steven Sharif: We're gonna be around afterward. By the way oh I'm sorry. Everybody oh we have a- gosh there's so many things. We have a party tonight at the Hilton. It's at the top of the Hilton starting at 7 o'clock. There's gonna be drinks and appetizers. You can come. We're all gonna be there. You can ask as many questions as you want. We also have a gift to everybody who attended our panel today. You will all be getting the PAX package cosmetics. So that's a mount, that's a cloak and it's a statue for PAX [applause] and then the last thing I want to do is thank everybody honestly not just here at this panel but also everybody watching from the stream. Everybody who's been a part of our community for the past year who has been following development, who's been giving us feedback, who's been on discord on our forums, who has been supporting this project. You know I know that the community out there for new MMORPGs can be a dangerous one with as many lasting as long as they have in development; and we recognize that, which is why we want to be as in touch with you as possible. Which is why we want to be here at these events. We want to talk to you on Discord. We want to get your feedback; and we appreciate you guys supporting us because this is why we're doing it. Not just a love of the genre but a love of the people in the genre. We all share a common passion for gaming, for building communities, for conflict, for cooperation, for things that make this such an awesome and unique genre; and we couldn't do this without you. We thank you guys all of you.