Alpha, Beta, Early Access, It's All The Same To Me: Ashes of Creation

There are eighteen posts here on Inventory Full with the "Ashes of Creation" label attached. The earliest is from the end of April 2017, just before the Kickstarter, when it seems my main interest in the proposed MMORPG was how good the housing was going to be. It seems an odd feature to focus on in a game that, at the time, I was repeatedly calling "Fantasy EVE",  but housing appears to have been my Big Thing back then.

Skimming those posts, it seems I was never all that keen on the project, not even when it was all new and shiny. In 2017, eight years ago, I described the promotional material for Ashes of Creation as giving the impression of "an MMO that would have looked about par for the course four or five years ago", the final big push for Western Mass Market MMOs. I seemed to think it would have fitted right in with the wave that gave us Guild Wars 2, Wildstar and The Secret World.

Even less enthusiastically, I was musing on whether or not to pledge, noting that "after reading the Kickstarter page, I'm actually less interested in the game than I was."

Somehow, I must have managed to overcome my reservations because a week later, on the day the Kickstarter went live, I was watching the numbers tick relentlessly upwards: "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 was pondering on whether it might be worth ponying up $80 to get into the first closed beta, which at the time was predicted for December that year. Closed Beta 2, access to which cost half as much, was due by the following Spring.

I didn't even especially want to play the game. I just wanted to get in early so I could blog about it. $80 sounded a lot for that, though, so I was inclining against it. I thought $40 sounded more reasonable.

And then, just a day later, I was back to say that I had, after all, stumped up my $80, only it wasn't on a pledge that would get me into the earliest closed beta. I'd bought two $40 tickets to Closed Beta 2, one for me and one for Mrs Bhagpuss, who was at least theoretically interested, again mostly for the housing.

Fast forward eight years and Ashes of Creation is still in Alpha. Eight. Years. Later. Just think about that for a moment. Eight years and still in Alpha, when pledges were sold on the basis that Beta would start... eight years ago.  

The Kickstarter, famously, went extremely well, bringing in over $3m on an ask of just $750k. Three million dollars, though, doesn't take you far with an AAA MMORPG. I haven't been paying enough attention over the near-decade the project has been running to be able to say where the rest of the funding has been coming from, but it appears the well has finally dried up because as of 11 December, Ashes of Creation is going into Early Access on Steam.

The stated reason is to "expand the audience" but the sentiment among redditors is more along the lines of cash grab or just plain Hail Mary pass. 

Intrepid may be short of money and desperate but I don't think anyone could reasonably call it a scam. The game has actually been in non-NDA Alpha for about a year now, and the build that will come to Steam is going to be much the same, so it's not hard to find out what you'll be getting for your fifty dollars.

Not hard, but you will have to look. The thing is... no-one outside the bubble has really been talking about it. Literally the only blogger or professional gaming website of the 200+ in my Feedly that's done more than post the odd Press Release this year is Heartless Gamer and he hasn't been all that impressed.  

Still, the game going into Early Access is a big deal, especially on Steam. Bree at MasivelyOP, in that post I linked above, re-iterated the point made by numerous commenters on reddit that AoC is "one of the few major Western MMORPGs currently in development." That could be interpreted in a couple of ways. You might think it means a whole lot of pressure to perform for Intrepid Studios. Or you might, as I'm starting to believe, begin to wonder if it means the day of the Western AAA MMORPG is over.

I played New World Aeternum for a couple of hours yesterday. I had a good time. I did all five of the first set of time trials in the Mount quest-line. The game ran well, the scenery was glorious, chat was busy and there were players everywhere. All of this in a game that's not only in maintenance mode but which has been mostly seen as a failure since a few weeks after launch. You wouldn't really know New World was a failure. But it is.

New World was first revealed to the public as a game in development in 2016, about a year before the Ashes of Creation Kickstarter. It launched as a fully live game in September 2021, re-launched on Console as Aeternum three years later and went into maintenance mode a couple of weeks ago. 

The game, which as far as I can recall is the only AAA Western MMORPG to have launched this decade, has completed its full development cycle in significantly less time than it's taken Ashes of Creation to reach Early Access. Or get out of Alpha, for that matter.  Even though New World sold over four million copies on PC at launch and is also available on console, and allowing that it may have been a recent victim of larger restructuring at Amazon, it has not been widely regarded as a success.

It's not for want of trying. New World is an excellent MMORPG and for most of its lifetime it's had the resources of a huge, wealthy parent company propping it up. Millions of players gave it a chance, enough, it's said, to have recouped its development cost in its first month of operation. 

And yet it still could not hold an audience. It seems not to have remained profitable for long, either. Many older players and veteran developers remain convinced there's an untapped mass market for fairly traditional Western MMORPGs but the evidence to support that belief seems harder to find. 

Players flock to new games in the genre but they very rarely stay for long. Whatever it is they're looking for, they just can't seem to find it. Maybe Ashes of Creation really is the last hurrah for big budget Western MMORPGs. If so, I certainly wouldn't hold out much hope for the genre after that.

Back when I was pledging to the AoC Kickstarter, I was also interested in another would-be new entrant to the genre - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. That game, which has been in development for about as long, preceded AoC into Early Access. It's done quite well there, attracting a peak concurrent player-base of around 7,000, very similar to AoC's reported peak alpha concurrency of about 8,000. 

These are solid figures for a niche game in closed testing or Early Access but they're not mainstream AAA game numbers. Not by a couple of orders of magnitude. All the big Eastern MMOs of the past few years have attracted millions of players. New World, as I said, sold four and a half million boxes in its first month. Concurrency on Steam peaked at more than 900,000. 

New World was considered a huge success. For a while. And then it wasn't. Build it and they will come. And then they will leave.

I'm coming around to the opinion that there will be no more long-running, mainstream MMORPGs produced in the West. There will be plenty of small, niche successes. There are lots of players out there, ready to pick a horse and sit on it as it plods along. But not that many. Success for those games is going to mean a loyal following in the low tens of thousands. At best.

And maybe that will be enough for Ashes of Creation. It is supposed to be the Fantasy EVE after all and EVE's concurrency is usually quoted somewhere between 20-35k. EVE is a long running, successful MMORPG, no question. But t's nowhere even close to being a mainstream game. 

All of this talk of populations and break-even points for commercial success and what it might mean for future game development in the genre is speculation, though. What we soon won't need to speculate about is whether Ashes of Creation is any good. 

Does it run well or is it a buggy mess? Does it look amazing or like the decade-old game it is? Is the gameplay fun or frustrating? Is the PvP balanced or is it a gankbox? And is that housing anything you'd want to live in?

All of that is already open knowledge, of course, or should be, since there's been no NDA for a year, but in a few weeks anyone who cares will be able to put down $50 and find out for themselves. 

I will not be paying another $50 on top of the $80 I already gave Intrepid eight years ago. Luckily, I won't have to. 

I was initially irked at the thought that the game I backed so long, long ago was going into Early Access with an Alpha build, apparently leaving me still waiting for the second round of Beta before I could join in. I figured that had to be what was going to happen. They'd have sent me an email if my pledge qualified me for EA access, surely. Wouldn't they? They send me plenty of PR emails, after all. It's  not like they don't know where to find me.

Still, I thought before I started complaining I probably ought to check. And guess what? On the Ashes Moments Substack (Whatever that is...) it says "all Beta-1 and Beta-2 key holders will also be granted access to the Early Access launch on December 11th". That's my ticket in.

Actually, my two tickets because Mrs Bhagpuss has long since moved on and won't be playing this or any other MMORPG. I'll have her account to play with as well. Not that I want two of them.

It looks as though I won't be playing on Steam, though. Current testers and anyone invited in on later pledges when the game hits Early Access will reportedly have to use Intrepid's own launcher. If they want to play on Steam, they'll have to buy a $50 Steam Key like anyone else. I'm unclear as to whether we'll all end up on the same servers after that. 

I guess I'll find out come December. It'll give me something new to write about for a while, at least. 

Which is really all I paid for in the first place. Eight long years ago.