So I got to play a bit of the Ashes of Creation alpha, an upcoming open world MMORPG. The eventual promise of the game, is that every action you take, can impact the world. You can help build a settlement into a city. It’s sort of EVE Online, but in a fantasy roll playing world, and perhaps not as complex… we’ll see.
To be fair, I generally don’t care for full PvP, open world MMORPGs, I prefer my games to be more theme park, like Final Fantasy XIV, which is a super great MMORPG, that I enjoy thoroughly, and I only use the Demo version of so far… World of Warcraft lost me a long time ago, long before the current player base drift.
Anyhow, Ashes of Creation, what little I’ve seen so far, is showing promise, and the developers are listening to player feedback. For example, one of the early quests have you gathering wood and stones for a wand… but the trees were hard to find, and they required like 25 trees, they narrowed that down to 10 trees, and seemed to have upped the spawn rates on those trees. When I had sent in that ticket, they said that other players were complaining about it, and they were going to fix it. Fix it they did.
Now to be clear, this game is clearly in an Alpha state, but some of the foundations are there. The graphic textures are okay, clearly meant to be more placeholder than final form, but they service well enough. The lighting effects are pretty impressive, and I think it’ll be one of the features that will help the game in the long run. The combat is serviceable enough, again alpha, but works well enough, and is TAB based.
Will I play Ashes on release? Probably not, as I said, I’m not into open world PvP, but I do hope they don’t make it something you can toggle off, I think we need a good open world PvP game out there, and Ashes promises to be that great game… if they don’t give in to the more casual players who want a more theme park experience. If they start doing that, then players may as well stick to New World.
Speaking of New World, that is the unfortunate timing of the alpha at the moment. I for one, am enjoying the closed beta of New World, so I haven’t really spent much time in Ashes during the test weekends, though after the beta ends, I’ll likely jump back into Ashes, and start working on helping the first real settlement I came across build up, see how that mechanic works.
If you watch my Twitch highlights below, you’ll see a basic idea of the state of the game as of July 2021.
Checking Ashes of Creation – PT 1
Checking Ashes of Creation – PT 2