For all of those with questions about Ashes of Creation, Intrepid Studios’ Steven Sharif streamed responses to questions the community asked via Reddit. In his answers, he covered development milestones, goals, plans to keep server populations viable, archetypes, and more on Alpha plans.
Many of the questions had to do with how development is going and when players can expect more Alpha testing. They are working on Alpha 2, still, but Sharif says that there will be spots test for Alpha 2 this year. Those players who are chosen out of the limited group should receive emails about testing when those dates are internally determined.
Noting that typically MMORPGs have one chance to really make an impression and get players’ attention, he addresses their plans for servers. With the sandbox elements and reliance on players in the world, there are server merge plans they could call upon if needed. Yet, they haven't determined the best way to do this in terms of resets or ownership, so they're still taking feedback.
Other things we can expect to see more of include secondary archetypes, which he confirms will be in Alpha 2 "to some degree" but also promises developer live streams will introduce and show them. Also coming up in a livestream is how healing will work, specifically when the team shows off the Cleric base class. He doesn't go into too much detail since that stream is already planned, But offers that what makes healing fun to him is the challenge of conserving mana and managing rotations to keep your team in fighting shape.
There are a number of questions he answers in the stream, all of which came from the most upvoted questions over on the Ashes of Creation subreddit. We can expect castle sieges and ships will potentially have a role, there are 23 named professions from three branches, the team is considering fast travel ideas and node ownership,as well as additional balance changes and evolution.
You can watch the full stream with all answers and keep up with Ashes of Creation here.
