Ready, Set, Go! : Ashes of Creation

As I began this post, the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter had been live for a quarter of an hour.  In that time there was already $161,872 pledged of the $750,000 goal. Not bad for the first fifteen minutes.

I've never watched a Kickstarter campaign launch before. It's an odd experience. I'd forgotten exactly when the whole thing was going to begin so I went to the regular website, where they've had a ticker counting down the seconds ever since the announcement that there was going to be a fundraiser.

By good luck I arrived at the site about half an hour before opening time. I went to play GW2 for a while and flicked back with a couple of minutes to go. I was curious to see what would happen when the timer reached 00:00:00.

Nothing is what happened. It just sat there, inert. In fact, since the timer was no longer counting down, rather than something exciting happening, as I'd hoped and half-expected, the web page became even less interesting than it had been.

I wondered whether, since I had the page open, I might be looking at a cached version, missing some amazing opening video or something, so I refreshed the page. It promptly took me to a 504 error. 

That's fixed now but the site itself is just back to exactly what it was. Nothing to see there.

So, absent a link from the web page (which seems to be missing a trick to me) I navigated to Kickstarter directly. I searched for Ashes of Creation and there it was. A very nice presentation. Professional, as you'd expect, given the experience of the people behind the project.

There's quite a lot of new information (or at least new to me) on the game itself. It details the eight races and the eight class archetypes for a start. 

Boy, do they look bland.

When I heard they were starting with eight races I was hoping for the chance to play something other than the usual: human, human with pointy ears, ugly human or short human. Ashes of Creation gives you Human, Elf, Orc and Dwarf. So much for that, then.

Also, splitting your four races in two does not give you eight races. Just sayin'.

The classes aren't any more inspiring. There's nothing wrong with the archetypes themselves, I guess, although they could scarcely be more vanilla if they'd arrived from Madagascar on last night's boat. Having tried to disguise the familiarity of the races by pulling the names out of a Scrabble bag they've taken the opposite approach with the class archetypes.

The intention was clearly to go for the most universally recognizable job titles a focus group could come up with. It's a sensible approach as far as a Kickstarter goes but let's hope these are just placeholders that are going to get a makeover somewhere along the road to launch. I really don't feel my blood begin to pump at the thought of playing a "Tank". 

In fact, has any MMO ever gone so far as to use "Tank" as an official class name? I doubt it. The nearest I can think of is City of Heroes "Tanker". It does speak to a certain kind of honesty in marketing, I guess. It's strange to see "Tank" and "Fighter" used separately, too, although the intent is clear enough.

So much for the minutiae. What about the pledge tiers? Well, they're about as you'd expect. Bottom of the shop is a $25 deal that gets you not a lot. Some in game emojis, a couple of forum badges, your name in the credits and one month of game time.

I was a bit puzzled by that. It's obvious there's a monthly subscription but I couldn't find anything that explained whether there was also a box - digital or physical - to buy. None of the tiers list getting the actual game as one of the perks but they all come with a month or more of "game time". Are there any MMOs that use a free to download, subscription required to play, model? Maybe AoC is aiming to be the first.

What I was most interested in was early access. You can buy into the second and presumably final phase of Closed Beta for a very reasonable $40 if you hurry or $50 if you get there after all 1500 of the forty dollar packs have gone. That also comes with two months of game time and a horse, plus, as always, everything in the preceding pack.

I'd guess Closed Beta 2 is a long way off. Kickstarter requires a fulfillment date and Intrepid Studios have gone for December 2018. I don't imagine anyone expects them to hit that target. Probably more likely to be sending out the beta keys around then if everything's going really well.

What I was really hoping for was an affordable tier with Alpha access or at least one that would get me in at the start of Closed Beta. Wishful thinking, of course. There's big money to be made lifting the velvet rope, even if the club, when you get inside, is all unfaced concrete and exposed wiring. 

Entry to the first Closed Beta comes at double what you'd pay for Phase Two. $80 is more than I'm willing to pay purely out of curiosity to get in at that point. Had it been an Alpha pass I might have wavered, although I'd only be interested if there was no NDA; the main reason I want in is to be able to blog about it, obviously.

It's a problem I don't have to worry about. The cheapest access to any form of Alpha comes with a price tag of $425 attached. That's for "Early Birds" and there are only 350 of those on offer. If you want one, better hurry - almost half of them have sold already. When they're all gone the price climbs to $500.

Am I going to pony up? Mmmm. Maybe. I'm still thinking about it, although, after reading the Kickstarter page, I'm actually less interested in the game than I was. 

It certainly looks as though it will fund. In the time it's taken me to write this post the pledge total has reached almost $370,000. Almost halfway to funding in less than two hours.

I'm going to think on it for a while. I'll probably end up going the $40. Can't say I'm feeling it though. Maybe Pantheon will to be the next keeper after all.