It’s finally happened! This month, Ashes of Creation launched early access, and with it launched the opportunity I’ve been waiting years for: the chance to share my thoughts and feelings on the game with all you lovely folks.
Now, I expect when this article drops in your feeds, you (like many of us) are likely in the thick of the holidays. Whether you celebrate anything or not, I hope you’re finding some time to get into your favorite games. For me, MMO time is actually quite limited as I’m bouncing all around with the family. What that means is that I’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s available to explore in AOC. But I can still share some initial impressions of the game with you. I fully anticipate that I’ll spend many more columns in an attempt to explore the different features of the game and how I can see it fitting into my evenings.
To short circuit the column a bit, I’ll even tell you up front: It’s not terrible! It might even be playable!
I know there are a lot of big thoughts and feelings on kickstarted MMOs and games in general, especially ones like this that have been burning for a long time, but I don’t actually have any of those bones to pick with AOC.
For a bit of background from my perspective, I’ve only ever backed a single MMO, and that was Crowfall. I basically threw my lot in with Crowfall and put AOC, Pantheon Rise of the Fallen, and Camelot Unchained out in the field of my mind. These other games were always there and in development as well, and I tended to follow them fairly closely, but I never took those games’ development progress personally. Crowfall, on the other hand, I really had some high hopes for. On a scale of what still exists and what doesn’t, I chose… poorly.
With that said, a lot of my first impressions here are influenced by my experiences with Crowfall. I wrote many columns expressing my concerns and disappointments with Crowfall. They weren’t all bad, though; I also could see where the game was doing some cool things too.
First up, let’s consider the character creator and beginner game of Ashes of Creation. The details you can add to the characters are not vast by any measure, but you do get some options in choosing how your character will end up looking. You get the choice of several races, each with its own theme, visuals, and styles. There’s something a bit hard or angular to a lot of the faces that I don’t really love. The ability to place and size tattoos anywhere on your hero is particularly nice.
It’s kind of strange viewing your heroes in the greater world too. From a purely aesthetic perspective, the world looks incredible. The vistas and looking around at the landscapes? Beautiful.
But the character models seem a bit out of place. It’s something that hopefully we’ll have time to see smoothed out and improved in the future because if the character and other models could match the rest of world, this would be a really incredible-looking game. Compared to Crowfall, that’s a complete reversal. The character art and animations I thought looked really great in Crowfall, but the world was kind of barren, probably because of its interactability. You could chop down and harvest most things – perhaps that’s the difference.
Much like the tutorial in many games, AOC’s tutorial offers a rough series of quests and markers leading you by the nose to your next point of interest. While not refined or especially engrossing, the quests do move you along. But there are a number of names and places to go that aren’t explained well at all. Even as you speak to the very first NPCs, they immediately present you with a choice that you cannot change. Either you go West for one reason or East for another. I think it’s sort of directing you towards more PvP versus PvE content, but it isn’t exactly clear. I don’t think the game necessarily should try to break immersion completely by labeling it explicitly, but it could elaborate a bit to make it more obvious that’s what they were getting at.
I’ve run down a few quests that were very basic, traditional, old-style MMO quests – your typical go here, kill X rats there, come back and report to me with what you found. Perhaps the quests will improve further along. I’ll report more on that in the future.
Combat is a very mixed bag for me right now too. Until I get more skills and levels under my belt (and maybe try a few more classes), I can’t say definitively whether it’s good or not. But it certainly is not obviously bad, I just can’t say whether it’s actually a good combat system or not. It’s mostly just weird.
Before you even try to fight something, the very first thing you need to do is open up the keybindings and enable autoattack. Make that your absolute first to-do because AOC has made the strange choice of mixing FPS- or extraction-style keybindings for what is basically just traditional MMO combat.
Your primary, basic attack is on the E key, weapon swap on Q, dodge on Z, and block on R. It feels so unnatural to try and tap the E key like a madman to keep attacking while also moving around with WASD and popping a skill or two off. So do yourself a favor and turn that on. To stack on the complaint a bit further, the autoattack turns into a toggle, so if you do try to tap it multiple times, you’ll end up starting and stopping the autoattack, which is even more annoying to see.
I know these keybinds are not unheard of, but the times I’ve used them is when I’m in an FPS. I’m just not built to rely on those, so I end up monkeying around with my keybindings quite a bit to normalize it for me. And of course, we do have the typical skill bar for other actions, so no worries there.
Another note is that the combat is pseudo action-style; you do have the ability to dodge, and timing that dodge is key to successfully forcing a miss, but it’s based on whether there’s a target lock on and whether it was timed just right, rather than on whether your animations make contact with each other. I-frames and what have you don’t really matter here.
Another way to explain it a bit better is to imagine you and a monster are smacking away at each other in melee. If you see the monster is about to swing and hit you, you can dodge backwards. Now, even if you’re three car lengths away from it when it completes the strike, the damage will proc if you didn’t time the dodge to match when the monster’s hit would tick up.
That’s about all I’ve got to share right now. It’s not the most in depth I’ve gone on a game, being as it’s just first impressions, but you can be sure there’s more to come over the course of the next several columns. For now, I’m tepidly optimistic. I’ve seen what many other players out there have said about the state of the game, but compared to some other early access MMOs I’ve played, this has potential. So far, it’s all-around a standard MMO start – and honestly, that’s a win for me.
