Servers

The world will be the same on each server, but Nodes will develop differently. Different servers will have different narratives. Things that happen on one server may not happen on another.

• Servers will be named after the champions of the great battles that led up to the fall of Verra.

There will be a multitude of servers located throughout the various regions of the world.

• Post launch, users will be able to select their server by the ping or the region that's notated next to the server.
• Ashes of Creation Apocalypse server selection is driven by the party leader. Whatever region they have selected will apply to their friends and squad.

We'll have a multitude of servers located throughout to the various regions of the world; and those servers will be good connection points for- and will be driven by- I mean there's two types of servers I'm sorry: For the alpha-1 arena those will be driven by the party leader right; and wherever whatever region they have selected if they invite friends to their squad or whatever, they'll be able to play on that region. With regards to live launch when the server's go live, you'll be selecting a server to play on; and that will be your character's home; and that server you'll be aware of where that server is located usually by either a ping or a region that's notated on next to the server. – Steven Sharif

Regions

Ashes of Creation will launch with the following server regions:

• North America (NA).
• Europe (EU).
• Asia/Pacific (SEA).
• Oceania (OCE) (Australia).
  • The likelihood is very high for Sydney or Melbourne based OCE servers.
  • OCE servers may not be provisioned until Beta for Ashes of Creation (the MMO) and live launch for Ashes of Creation Apocalypse.

Other server regions will be considered based on interest.

• South America is under consideration due to traffic from that region.

At this stage we do not have numbers on how many different servers will exist for different regions. We've said in the past 8-10,000 concurrent users per server is what we'd like to aim for. Obviously, the number of servers that exist in a region are going to be dependent on the population that's playing. – Steven Sharif

Certain regions will have "harmonized" subscription prices that better reflect their local economies. These regions will be segregated from other regions.

• Players will be able to make characters on any server they wish. There will be no region locking.

Folks have always been able to make characters on any server they wish. We are not region locking anyone. – Margaret Krohn

Localization

Ashes of Creation will be initially available in English, French, German, and Russian.

• Italian, Polish and Spanish localization will then be added.
  • Spanish will be added in the near future.
• Other languages are being considered.

Servers won't be language locked.

• There may be separate servers in the EU region based on language type.

There's localization that will be present in the German and French Russian languages to start; and then we intend to also localize in Italian, Polish and Spanish. So servers will be allocated within the region as being one of those language type servers. So it's not going to be per country per se as it might be per language. – Steven Sharif

Efforts will be made to translate Ashes of Creation into multiple languages.

• Translation will be done in the game client based on interest.
• User interface localization tools are available in the chat window.

Server population

Population limits will be enforced on each server.

• Around 8-10k concurrent users per server is projected.
  • Initially there will be a limited number of registered accounts (approximately 15,000) per server to help mitigate login queues.
  • This limit will increase over time to around 50,000 registered accounts per server.

• The developers intend to carefully manage server populations via the use of character creation throttles to avoid the need to merge servers. There may be queues to get into high population servers, but the aim is to avoid excessively long queues.

Part of the equation of essentially watching to make sure that we don't over populate the server selection, but at the same time making sure that there's not a queue system in place that's so long it's detrimental to the concurrency of the player's will to play so to speak. It's a tough balancing act. – Steven Sharif

Server reservations

Server reservations allow guild members as well as unaffiliated players to reserve character slots on a server starting in the Beta testing stages of the game.

This would likely be utilized more so by guilds than that would be solo or unaffiliated players; and I believe that the solo player they may have friends that they want to play with. That's fine, they can also still with those friends do the reservation system, but the player who is just joining the game fresh and doesn't have a community that they're part of, I don't think they really mind in that regard and will not utilize that system. – Steven Sharif

Name reservations

Name reservations were rewards for backing at the Pioneer level and higher and are currently available through the Voyager plus pre-order pack.

• Accounts will have name reservation tokens, that entitle its holder to reserve a name on a specific server when the reservation time comes.

Server prime-time

Objective-based events such as Node sieges, Castle sieges, Guild wars, and Node wars will occur within a prime-time window somewhere between 3PM and 9PM server time. This is subject to testing.

Server transfers

Server transfers will not be possible initially. The developers intend to assess the impact on housing and other systems closer to launch.

Unreal engine 4 (Custom back-end)

Unreal Engine 4 is the graphical engine for Ashes of Creation.

• Ashes of Creation will feature a custom Unreal Engine back-end with proprietary networking code to enable mass combat in the open world: such as PvP, Node sieges, Castle sieges, Dungeons and World bosses.
  • The networking solution dynamically distributes processes and scales up necessary server instances to accommodate player density across the world.

• The developers are moving from Unreal Engine 4.25 to 4.26 during the Alpha-1 spot testing.

• Intrepid Studios will be evaluating the potential to upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 in the future.

Unreal engine makes it really fast to iterate... Compared to other gaming engines, I can do something in a hour that would take eight hours to do in another engine. – Jeffrey Bard

We're ripping out most of the network code that Unreal has and putting in our own just so that it works with our game and so everything is as efficient as possible. We're not going to have any replication problems because we're building it ourselves. – Jeffrey Bard

One of the most important things about Epic Games as the creators of Unreal Engine is the way they've allowed developers to have access to the source code. To be able to do that makes the engine very versatile. – Steven Sharif

Alpha-1 servers

Serwery Alpha-1 zostaną udostępnione w następujących regionach.

• NA - Ameryka Północna.
• EU - Unia Europejska (Frankfurt).
• Serwery OCE - Oceanii nie zostały uwzględnione.

Serwery Alpha-1 będą obsługiwać od 1500 do 2000 jednoczesnych użytkowników.

Population based scaling

The prices that NPCs sell items for will scale based on the economic activity on a server. Prices will rise to combat inflation and fall as a population diminishes.

The node system allows the developers to scale the experience needed to level a node and the attrition that delevels a node based on activity.

Things that NPCs buy and sell kind of scale based on the economic activity that exists on that server... As inflation rises, prices rise and everything kind of ends up being equal, even though there might be a couple of extra zeros. So that can go up and it can also go down so as a population leaves, things become less expensive and players don't have to do as much to earn that. On the other side of things we look at the node system and the node system is set up in this really flexible way that allows us to scale the experience needed to level a node and the attrition that delevels a node to scale based on activity too. So you know it's just a matter of adjusting a couple of constants and that goes up and down and the server can watch it and change those on the fly as it needs to. – Jeffrey Bard

Server-wide announcements

There will be global (server-wide) announcements/notifications of important events.

• Castle sieges.
• Node sieges.
• Legendary world boss spawns.
• Monster coin events.
• Dungeon opportunities.

New citizens of a node may be announced in a dedicated node citizen chat channel.

• Election notices will be mailed to the accounts of citizens.

Local node events, such as Caravans will not be announced. These will rely on player word-of-mouth.

Whether it be like a siege or a triggered event against a city or like a unique dungeon opportunity... those types of things are going to involve notifications. Especially to the citizens of the city; where you'll be informed of an impending event. Basically it will give you time. – Steven Sharif

Server history

The history of each server will be tracked and visible to players.

We're gonna keep track of the history of the world so that we can tell people the story up to the current day. A player who's brand new, who's come in at the six-month mark can take a look at each server, what each server has done, how each server has tackled the storyline; and they can decide for themselves what community they want to join; what version of the world that they want to take part in. – Jeffrey Bard

Libraries

Scientific node building.

At the Village stage, the scientific node's unique building is the Library. Players can use the Library to access information, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Historia strony of narrative events and when they occurred.
• Locations and last known quantity of gatherable resources.
  • As players report resource locations to their library, node citizens will see updated information for those resources on their map.
• Locations and inhabitants of new dungeons or POIs (points of Interest) that have spawned.
• Runic power stones for armor.
• Common armor and weapon recipes (level 25 and under).

Reports of information to the library may expire after a period of time (say one week). After which new reports will be required to update the existing information.

You'll get that shroud of war functionality for the week after a report but if it doesn't receive a follow-up report after that expiration period then it will not be updating real time. – Steven Sharif

Server instancing

There won't be server channels (sharding) on a server.

Dungeons and Raids

Alpha-1 open world dungeon entrance.

80% of the content that will exist in Ashes of Creation is open-world and there's a specific reason for that. So because of the way that friendships and or enemies are forged in the game and people have the opportunity to create their own friends or foes. We want that to play out from a contesting standpoint as well. So a lot of these hunting grounds or raid bosses that people are going to have opportunities to kill, they're going to be essentially contested potentially by your your enemies that you've created in the game or you can work together to create alliances in order to defend those contested zones. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation will be a seamless open-world experience.

• No loading time or loading screens between regions.

There will be open world dungeons and raids. The aspiration is to maintain the open world feel while being able to capitalize on the benefits of instanced mechanics.

• Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal. Outside of these and arenas there will not be too much instancing anywhere else.
• There will be an 80/20 split between open world vs instanced encounters.

We're probably going to do instancing only in certain dungeons and in arenas. You probably won't see instancing too much anywhere else. What you see is gonna be what you get. – Jeffrey Bard

The PvP flagging system presents an opportunity for open conflict.

PvP Arenas

Pre-alpha arena combat footage from PAX West 2017.

Pre-alpha Arena UI.

Arenas are instanced PvP scenarios and are not part of open world PvP.

• Arenas will have 1 man, 3 man, 5 man and possibly 20 man Free-For-All (Deathmatch) group sizes.
  • There won't specifically be guild vs guild arenas but team-based matchmaking allows teams to face other teams.
• There will be an arena ladder system.
  • Rewards for arena ladders will be revealed at a later time.
  • Titles can be received from arena play.
  • Arena points that can be used to buy gear are not currently in the design.
• Mayors of military nodes are chosen from citizens through last man standing (gladiatorial arena style) combat.
• The arena system may support cross-server combat.
• Arena style combat is instanced but spectators may be possible through an interface.

Server vs server

The arena system may support cross-server combat.

• There may be monthly competitions where the winning server and winning team receive beneficial buffs for the month.

We definitely like cross-server play. I think it's cool because it is something that players get to participate in. – Steven Sharif

When you're talking about Arena play especially, one server might not be able to support that depending on what's going on with it, but across all the servers then we've got a really great pool for matchmaking. – Jeffrey Bard

Metrics

Ashes of Creation gathers tracking data to facilitate achievements, titles and other accolades on a server.

• Number of successful siege defenses.
• Number of successful siege assaults.
• Number of PvP kills.
• Raid participation points.
• Number of firsts.

Visibility of those types of things on the server help to promote a competitive atmosphere. If there is an attainable impression that you can work towards, so that others know your success, you have more drive to succeed. – Steven Sharif

Leader boards

There will be dungeon and raid leader boards.

• Some leader boards will be across all servers.

Headstart servers

The number of head start servers is estimated to be three. This is subject to change.

• There will be an OCE headstart server.

Server maintenance

Scheduled server downtime will occur on a weekly basis.

Publishers

Intrepid Studios will self-publish Ashes of Creation in the NA (North American), OCE (Oceanic) and SEA (Southeast Asia) regions.

• Intrepid Studios will be opening offices in Amsterdam to help support their publishing operations in the EU (European Union) and CIS regions.

We have learned a lot from our partnership with MY.GAMES, and we wish our friends there all the best as we have mutually decided to part ways. Looking ahead, we’re excited to announce that Intrepid Studios will be opening European offices in Amsterdam to help support our publishing operations in the EU/CIS regions. We have recently posted open positions for our new EU offices, and look forward to hiring the best and brightest in true Intrepid fashion. – Steven Sharif

The Ashes of Creation MMORPG will not be published on the Steam platform.

• Ashes of Creation Apocalypse battle royale early access testing ended on March 10, 2020. It was previously available for download on the official website and on Steam.

My.games FAQ

Q: What does this mean for my Ashes of Creation account with MY.GAMES moving forward?

A: In the coming weeks, we will announce the migration steps for moving your account to Intrepid Studios, rest assured all purchases and achievements will remain with your account.

Q: What happens to my purchases on my MY.GAMES account moving forward?

A: The purchases and achievements you have on your MY.GAMES account will be migrated to the Intrepid Studios account management system.

Q: What happens if I already have both a MY.GAMES account and an Ashes of Creation account?

A: If you currently own both an Intrepid Account and MY.GAMES account that you intend to migrate, you will be able to submit a support ticket and we will help to consolidate your accounts into one, if you so desire.

Q: If I was a MY.GAMES customer, how can I purchase the individual monthly cosmetics that were not available through their website?

A: If you owned a pre-order package during the time of a desired individual monthly cosmetic, you will be able to submit a ticket through our customer support system, where we will then verify your eligibility to purchase the cosmetics and help to facilitate that purchase.

Q: What will I need to do to play on European or Russian servers in the future?

A: You will need to ensure your migration in the coming weeks, and use your Intrepid account to access the game.

Q: What does this mean for your regional and language support moving forward?

A: Intrepid Studios will be working to ensure proper localization in our supported languages as we build out our publishing operations in the EU.

Q: If I don't want to transfer or migrate my MY.GAMES account, can I get a refund?

A: Any players who previously purchased their pre-order through MY.GAMES can submit a support request through MY.GAMES for a full refund.

Q: What happens to my personal information associated with my MY.GAMES account?

A: When you migrate your account to Intrepid Studios, you will also be migrating the personal information associated with your account. If you would like to request that MY.GAMES removes your personal information, please reach out to their support team directly here.

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Server types

• There won't be separate roleplaying (RP) servers.
• There won't be separate PvE and PvP servers.

PvX

We like to really refer to ourselves as a PvX game, because in those systems of PvP, PvE, crafting they're all intertwined: They're interdependent on each other... Our system of development really requires some interdependence there between those things. You're going to need a crafter to give you the best items. You're going to need PvPers to secure cities and castles. You're gonna need PvErs to take down those world bosses for those materials to craft. – Steven Sharif

Ashes is a comprehensive game. It is not a PvP focused or a PvE focused, it is a comprehensive PvX game and as a result these systems are all interconnected and have to coexist with one another with certain types of mechanisms that can provide that give and take, that push and shove. – Steven Sharif

Ashes of Creation is a PvX game. Players will naturally encounter both PvP and PvE elements. It is unlikely that a player could purely focus on just PvP or just PvE.

• There is a balance between PvP and PvE in Ashes of Creation.
• Some servers may be more PvP focused than others.
• There will not be different PvP and PvE gear types.
• Progression in the game might require PvE elements.
• All stats relate to a player's combat effectiveness in PvX.

We're very clear with our objective and philosophy on the game and we understand that they may not appeal to everybody. But you know it is an important reciprocal relationship between the content that's related to PvE and the content that's related to PvP and they feed off of each other. They're catalysts for change: Their progression, their development. It's things that people can value when they see something earned and they see something lost. That elicits an emotional response from the player: That they've invested time in to either succeed or fail; and PvP allows for that element to be introduced into gameplay. And we're very clear that is our objective: That risk versus reward relationship, that achievement-based mentality. Not everybody's going to be a winner and that's okay. – Steven Sharif

Procedural generation

Verra will not be randomly generated, but the starting resource points may be different on each server.

Testing server wipes

Alpha and Beta servers will be wiped prior to launch.

• Servers may also be wiped between individual tests, unless the developers require progression to be saved for certain spot tests.

As a general rule, if the testing phase contains the word Alpha, it is safe to assume there will likely be wipes. – Steven Sharif

Server hosting

Ashes of Creation servers are being hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• The Ashes of Creation Apocalypse stress test was hosted by Microsoft servers in the US Midwest (Ohio).
• Google was the original candidate for server hosting.

See also

• Ashes of Creation
• Release schedule