Ashes of creation looks good: I was wrong

Humble pie served

When you tell me you've got the best video game ever in the world bar none; something so good it's going to do my taxes and write my dissertation, my first instinct is to shake my head and go 'nuh uh'! To self psychoanalyse for a second, I suspect that's due to my defensive pessimism I've trained myself to habitualise in the face of hope. Too many times have I had expectations popped, too often has the 'too good to be true' train proved to be exactly what it says on the sidecar. And no matter how many people scream at me that this is the real deal, unless the trailers themselves have managed to spark that fire inside me, no one else can. I'll take it from the source and not a soul else. A lesson I learnt well from Cyberpunk; a game I was in no way interested in until the play-by-play breakdown of the gameplay walkthrough by Yongyea. (Not that I blame him for the state that game turned out as, but without his video I would have let the entire game pass me by until launch and been a lot happier for it. No shade. Just fact.)

But every now and then I have to hold up my hands and admit that not every ambitious project out there is a scam looking to snatch away your first house, cars and pets in the grift of the century. Sure, a lot of them are that; especially now in the age of ScamFT's, but a general brush stroke always colours too far. If I play the curmudgeon about everything, all the time, then I'd be a right bore to be around. Besides, I'm certainly not good at it anyway. I wouldn't have bought Baldur's Gate 3 if I was a total unbeliever in hype as I'm led myself to believe. And yeah, that game is certainly taking it's sweet time; but I don't think of it as some sort of scam project! So it's with that same olive branch that I offer my apologies to Ashes of Creation. A game which has defied my very low expectations time and time again, and not materialised as the scam vapourware project I believed it to be in my very bones. I don't know if I've ever made such an accusation out loud on this blog (I've done a blog once every day for the past three years, I've no clue of half the crap that's on here.) but if I have, then I apologise. I was wrong.

Ashes of Creation is a prospective MMORPG, to throw on the pile of wannabe MMOs announced every other year. That might have fed into my prejudice; too many clueless development studios absolutely underestimate the amount of work that goes into making, let alone maintaining, a proper MMO and just launch themselves at it with blind gusto. They hear about the relatively meagre team who put together WOW and think "Huh, we can match that no problem!", disregarding the veteran talents on that original team, the effort it took to bring out a title to stand opposite Ultima Online, and the sparseness of the MMO genre, and the gaming industry in general, back then. All of those traps trick too many hopefuls in the planning stage and I assumed Ashes of Creation to be more tinder for the pile. I no longer think that. Ashes might just be a serious MMO coming out to play one day.

The big draw of this MMO over the others that litter the current market is the way in which the world is shaped by the player, and I would say "stop me if you've heard this before"; but then we'd end up getting literally nowhere, now wouldn't we?" This is the sort of idea where players decide the landscape of the world, build their own towns, manage the economy. More so then what you'd see out of current active MMOs, something almost akin to complete player world simulation. At least that's the idea. Typically games like this stop short of total player controlled world simulation because at that point everything becomes too much work and you lose the potential casual crowd. But I've seen this sort of 'build and make your mark on the world' thing reiterated again and again since Archeage, and everytime it amounts to a pay-to-win power charge fuelled by ill-thought out idealism. Will this be any different? Perhaps. But I'm not holding my breath or anything.

Still, this is an apology tour and so I'm going to stick to my apology. First step of which comes in admitting; this team aren't hacks. They know what they're doing, and this was made abundantly clear in the character creator showcase recently which blew my meagre expectations right the heck out of the fishtank. You can talk all you want about grand ideas for what the world is going to be, even shown decently rendered landscapes are only somewhat comforting, there are plenty of great landscape tools out there and assets from stores that can look brilliant when shot in the right way. But a full showcase of a detailed and powerful character customizer? That doesn't just fall out of anyone's ears into the laps of Kickstarter investors. Pulling that off takes knowhow and talent. And I'm both impressed and humbled.

"Wait. A character creator made you change your tune?" Yes, and I stand by it. This really is one of the coolest character creators I've ever seen for an MMO, which in itself is enough to make me a little suspicious, but at least I have to admit that programming talent is present here! Typically MMOs have these very low-maintenance character generators in order to make it easier to render so many individual character models in the same area rapidly. If everyone is only using the bare basic model with a few extras stuck on, you don't need to worry about dedicating too many loading resources in big public hubs or massive competitive bouts. Of course, that's also something of an antiquated concern given the vast progression of technology, but even modern games like Destiny, a supposed MMO, still maintain about 5 preset faces as it's entire character generator, so this prejudice holds some vague merit.

But in this brief demonstration I watched the team slap together a really good impression of Asmongold, as well as flurry through a stable of distinct looking faces with totally different structure and composition. We saw their free-form tattoo system, which mimics the placement of decals on Car games; and fits so well here you might even wonder why no one has tried something like this before. And we even caught a glimpse of the face blender, which is criminally under-replicated in the character creator meta despite how helpful it is in allowing people to quickly and easily make unique and interesting character faces without dedicating hours. I mean sure, I'll be the guy who spends hours tweaking all the small things regardless, but having the choice of just blending two presets together until I get something I like is nice. Systems like these are all about options.

So yes, that is the story about how a character creator totally shifted my view on an upcoming game and made me a believer, if not a fan. Yeah, I still don't like games like these. But I'm going to pay attention to what this game puts out in the future to see if it might be the exception and win me over despite the general failings of the genre, because I'm ever eager and willing to be proven wrong about games I'm bad at. (Though sometimes I do need help getting over the finishing line. Turns out just downloading the Homeworld games hasn't given me the strength to endure them past the extended tutorials, for example.) Now if only more Kickstarter projects actually turned into something that looks half as good as this does, we'd be able to adopt a lot less pessimism across this industry as a whole; and wouldn't that be nice?