Creative Director's Letter July 2019

Glorious Ashes Community!

During the second quarter of 2019, we’ve been excited to share our development process and progress with everyone through our Developer Diaries videos, articles, and new live stream format which I hope you have thoroughly enjoyed! As you watch these iterations of creatures, environments, and systems being produced, we want you to keep in mind that this is a world being continually worked on and that changes are constantly being made to make it better and better each day. If you look back at some of the very early videos of Ashes, you will see just how much has changed over the course of our development. You will continue to see this level of improvement as we iterate during our Alphas and Betas.

With the launch of our updated forums, I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s feedback and suggestions, especially as part of the Developer Discussions. We are delighted with the variety of responses from these questions. The passion our community has shown has been glorious, and it’s been stimulating to read the stories of your previous MMORPG adventures. Our goal is to replicate these feelings of excitement, danger, and exploration as we open the doors to the world of Verra. Your responses have reinforced that we are moving in the right direction with our content and systems.

Our Team

As with each quarter, we'll be updating our Team page - please welcome these wonderful new faces to the Ashes community. They have been quickly brought up to speed, and you’ve probably already seen work from some of them! For instance, Jincy has done amazing work on the Fellbeak Macaw which you can read all about and watch her creation process in one of our recent articles. Also, Danielle has been another excellent addition to our team - aiding us in our quest to decrease the time users spend waiting for their Customer Service tickets to be resolved, and solidifying our support processes. We are also very excited to add three new designers to the team - Brian, J.R., and Terrence. Intrepid continues to grow and we are always looking for incredible talent to join our team. Help us spread the word!

Ashes of Creation Apocalypse - The Testing Ground

Our team is dedicated to providing the MMORPG we all have been waiting for. Thanks to our community’s incredible support, we successfully pinpointed critical systems in need of revision for Alpha One through the use of our Apocalypse testing ground. After taking the time needed to finalize these revisions, we are happy to announce that starting August 20, 2019 at 11:00 AM PDT the Divine Gateways will open once more for limited Apocalypse testing sessions. We can’t wait to hear your feedback on the updated performance, user interface, art iteration, and combat changes that you’ll see during this phase. We’ve learned a lot from our previous testing and we are using that knowledge to ensure smoother testing periods moving forward. Once we have successfully vetted our back-end changes with Apocalypse during August and September, we will have better insight for future dates involving Siege Mode, Horde Mode, and the highly anticipated MMORPG’s Alpha One. We hope you'll join us for this incredible journey!

Ashes of Creation - The MMORPG

We’ve been having fun creating all kinds of creatures for Ashes of Creation which we’ve been displaying on our live streams and in our articles! During our Kickstarter, you helped us unlock a “cute small pets” stretch goal when we hit 6,500 backers and now we have a special request for our backers. We want YOU to help us vote on which kitten and puppy we create! If you are one of our backers from our original Kickstarter campaign, head on over to our forums, log in, and cast your votes. (Please note that only backers from our original Kickstarter campaign will be able to see the polls and vote.)

We’ll be locking in the final tally on July 23, 2019 at 11:00 AM PDT, so get your votes in before the polls close. During the creation process of these pets, we’ll be sharing the progress of each stage on our live streams and social media as we have been for our other creatures, so be sure to follow us on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter!

While our community has watched us bring a variety of our creatures from concept to animation these past monthly progress updates, we’ve also been internally testing systems and designs integral to Alpha One. The team has been hard at work creating some of the key systems you'll utilize on a day-to-day basis. Please note however: this development involves highly iterative designs and arduous engineering work done behind the scenes. As we finish the QA process of these systems, we will continue to share updates with our glorious community which are representative of the ALPHA states of the game.

The march towards Alpha One testing is filled with many iterations and lots of refinement, so I want to share some development progress of one of our core systems - the Mayoral Caravan System. Please note that as stated above this is not completed nor is it by any means polished, but it provides you a bit of insight into how we set up a gameplay system. The Mayoral Caravans in particular will interact with the Node System in a very integral way, allowing mayors to establish trade with nearby cities, extend relationships with other Nodes, and create the opportunity for conflict and cooperation. As we get closer to Alpha One, you can expect to see more videos detailing our systems and designs. It’s our hope, as always, to provide our glorious community with a look inside the development process of Ashes.

As we move forward into the next quarter, we are excited to start testing with your help once again in August. We appreciate your patience as we work diligently to produce the quality of content that we can be proud of as a team here at Intrepid Studios. We look forward to all of your feedback as we continue to create one of the most ambitious MMORPGs. I hope that everyone continues to enjoy the content we’ve been releasing as the team here has been extremely eager to share our progress.

As always, thank you for supporting our family here at Intrepid Studios, and thank you for being part of this journey with us.

Steven Sharif