Ashes Of Creation: First Impressions

For once, I'm not going to try anything fancy. No bullet point lists or categories. No framing structure or cutesy faux-RP storytelling. I'm just going to say what I think of the game so far. How about that for an original idea?

First up, it was really easy to link the Intrepid and Steam accounts. Well, it was once I managed to catch the Ashes of Creation website up for five minutes. I had, of course, forgotten whatever password I created for it nearly a decade ago but that was soon remedied and after that it was very plain sailing. 

The client is huge, though. Almost 140GB. Surely that will have to come down if the game ever officially launches. Luckily for me, I have a totally unused 1TB HDD in this new PC. With great timing, we had to go sell the old car this morning, so before we left I set the download running. I came back two hours later to find it had finished downloading and was 99% validated too. Glad I didn't have to sit in and watch those progress bars...

I had lunch and then sat down to play. I wasn't wildly enthusiastic but I was curious to see what eight years wait had brought. 

No introductory movie for a start. Or any kind of introduction at all. Just the usual warning about flashing lights then straight into character creation. 

Well, I say "straight into..."  More like v e r y  s l o w l y into. I have never seen parts of a UI take so long to load. It was so slow I thought they must not have the models available for all the races or the icons for all the skills, presumably because the game is still in Alpha, even though it's also Early Access, somehow. 

But no. Not that.

 As I was already making my choices, sight unseen, icons and images finally started to load. In the end everything was there. Nine races and eight classes, I think, although some of the options are really two variants of  the same race.

I had already picked one (Niküa.) from the description before I found out what I was going to look like.

Moana, basically. Moana, after a giant must have stepped on her.

It wasn't remotely what I was expecting but I was pretty pleased with what I got. As I've said before, it makes a huge difference to me if I feel a connection with my character and this one clicked with me immediately.

There aren't all that many choices to make after you pick Race and Class. Hairstyles and colors, skin tone, height, eyes, nose, mouth... the usual. There's an option to morph your face, so I'm guessing you can make some extreme looks but I didn't bother with any of that. I wanted to get in and have a look around.

The Niküa get a choice of two starting locations, one in the hilly North and one in the flat South but the Northern one comes with a warning that the area isn't done yet so I picked the other. At some point, I forget exactly when, I also had to pick a server from a list of eight or so, either in the EU or East Coast USA. The ping to the East Coast was around 50-60ms, which is fine, so I went for one of those.

And then I was in. And everything was good. Very little lag. Movement felt reasonably smooth. No obvious hiccups or delays. 

The UI felt very intuitive. It would be very familiar and comfortable to anyone who played one of the big, Western theme park MMORPGs in the 2010s or teens. All the controls do what you'd think they'd do. There's a hotbar where you'd expect to find one. All of that.

I did what I always do at this point: opened Settings and turned off as much of the overhead clutter as I could without making the game unplayable. In some games that can be a long job. Not in this one. I had everything set up pretty much as I like it in minutes.

About the only thing I had to google was how to hide the UI for screenshots. It's the Page Down key, an unusual choice but perfectly acceptable, certainly a lot better than the Ctrl-Shift-Something you often get nowadays. Even autorun was on Num Lock and Interact on F, two things I regularly have to change. It was almost as if someone had been playing EverQuest and just copied the keybinds across.

All of that was a pleasant surprise. It put me in a good frame of mind to see what the actual game might be like. And guess what? That was a pleasant surprise, too.

Based on the starting area, if Ashes of Creation had come out when my Kickstarter pledge suggested it was going to, namely sometime in 2017 or 2018, it would have been pretty much what I was hoping for. A tab-target Western fantasy MMORPG with action bars. 

I'd forgotten that one of the primary reasons I was interested in it at the time was that it promised to use the standard (WoW-style.) set-up rather than what were calling "Action" controls back then. At the time I preferred to click icons on hotbars and Mrs Bhagpuss insisted on it. AoC was going to be the next big MMORPG we played together largely because of that. 

 Now, of course, I've played so many action-rpgs with so many control systems I barely even notice which it is any more. And Mrs. Bhagpuss has given up on MMORPGs altogether. 

This is a First Impressions piece, not any kind of review or analysis, but I will say that it very much looks as if AoC might be the right game for the wrong time. It's not 2018 any more. The pandemic changed a lot of things and I'm realizing now that one of the things it changed for me was my connection with MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, Valheim did. There's a post to be written about that but this isn't it. 

Anyway, I suspect the mainstream ship for games like this has long since sailed. A solid niche success though? That's still very much a port worth steering for.

Getting back to the First Impressions, they continued to be very favorable right until I had to log out to go and have tea. By then I'd been playing for almost three hours, which is a really long session by my current standards. I would happily have gone on for quite a while longer, too.

Visually, or graphically if you prefer, the game looks very attractive, as I think the screenshots show. I let the game audit my PC and set the optimum settings accordingly, which turned out to be "Medium" all the way. I'm very happy with that, given I deliberately chose a low-end system. If it looks this good and plays this smoothly on my machine, I imagine it must look and play much better on a proper gaming rig. Although in my experience that doesn't always necessarily follow...

By the time I logged out, I was Level 4. I'd done a lot of quests, all of them absolutely classic mainstream theme-park MMO fare. I started off killing goblins, then got sent from one outpost to another to introduce myself, before I was given a whole bunch of jobs for which I was barely qualified, everything from interrogating prisoners to breaking up a suspected demonic ritual. 

Eventually I graduated to raiding bandit camps for evidence of some kind of conspiracy. Every quest was verbose to a degree unusual even for the genre, which has always been very heavy on the word count. It was all quite well-written, in the typical RPG style. 

Each hand-in came with a fulsome recap of exactly what I'd just done, frequently with lots of extraneous, scene-setting detail that I would have better appreciated if it had come at the time I was actually doing whatever it was I was now being told I'd done. A lot of it came as news to me. 

Thinking about it makes me want to write a whole essay on MMORPG quest writing but I'll save that for another time. What I will say is that I'm not sure I have the patience for this sort of thing any more. It's a lot of reading. Some of it was quite enjoyable but it takes so long. Is this really the level of detail most players want for every little side-quest? It smacks of someone having had far too much time on their hands and not much to do with it, these last eight years.

Still, I did read most of it. And it was mostly quite engaging. So I'm not complaining as such. I'm just acutely aware that if I'd skipped all the jabber, like probably 90% of players would, I'd probably have been two levels higher when I logged out. It really did take that long.

One thing I liked much more than having to plow though all that verbiage was being given a horse almost at the start. I always think it's a good sign if the developers allow you to mount up from the beginning of the game rather than holding it back as some sort of reward you have to earn. 

In fact, most of the choices I was aware of the developers having made seemed very encouraging. I did get the feeling they wanted me to enjoy myself, which you'd think would be a given in a video game but I imagine we all know is very much not.

Take PvP, for example. I've read an awful lot of scare stories about non-consensual PvP and ganking in Ashes of Creation, which certainly does advertise itself as a PvP title, so I was both surprised and pleased to find that, at least in the starting areas, PvP is off by default. You have to switch it on if you want it. 

Or you can just attack someone, I think. That'll set you up for a good kicking, if not by the other player then by the guards. If someone attacks you and you decline to respond, the only flag that gets set is on the attacker. You can just stroll away and let the authorities deal with it.

At least, I think that's how it works. I didn't see a single example of anyone fighting anyone else in the few hours I was there. I imagine there's plenty of that later but if anyone's worried about getting repeatedly ganked at spawn before they even load into the game, I can re-assure you it's not going to happen. 

What you are going to see, almost as unwelcome as a gank squad barrelling towards you, is endless gold spam in General Chat. I haven't seen this much for years. In one way, it's the sign of success. No-one wastes time trying to sell gold in a game that no-one plays.

You'd think no-one would bother in game that's still in Alpha, either, but that just tells you these labels mean nothing any more. Intrepid can call this "Alpha" and "Early Access" all they want but when the doors are open to all, they're taking money and there are tens of thousands of people playing, we all know that means Ashes of Creation has launched. It may not be anywhere even close to being done but so what? It's an MMORPG. A finished game has never been a requirement.

Am I bothered? Surprisingly not. To my considerable surprise, it looks as though the game I signed up for might be the game I got. I mean, I'd rather have had it six or seven years ago, when they told me I would and when I'd really have appreciated it, but I wasn't expecting it to be this close to what I imagined it would be, all those years ago. Now I've seen it, I'm a lot happier with what's there than I thought I would be.

How long that will last is another question. I'm only Level 4. A lot of games are fun in the early levels. For a First Impression, though, I'd have to say this has been pretty solid. I'm keen to wrap this up and get back for some more. After that, maybe I'll be back with some rather more critical comments.

Or maybe I'll still be having an unexpectedly good time. I do hope so. We could all do with a decent, new traditional MMORPG.