Ashes of Creation

Befallen Forge miniboss with Nexus guild on Lyneth server

Massive content add coming next week, desert will have 6 "pocket dungeons" added (think highwayman hills, Halls of Judication, etc.), desert will have unique resources to gather and new mob types (Snake people, Najath), new named mobs and items, new recipes, etc etc.



Also, here is a video of our guild alliance on the Lyneth server doing some large scale caravan PVP. We ran 25 ish caravans and got taken by surprise by a raid of about 60 of the enemy alliance...they routed us and the start of this video is us regrouping and wiped them at the end to finish them. At around 3min mark you can see us run by a bunch of our caravans that they destroyed. And yes this is the desert as it has been for the last 4 weeks.

Start the video at 4:30 unless you like watching me run around aimlessly.

Glad to see the desert getting fleshed out. I think Massive might be an overstatement.

Still curious about the rogue.....

Mahes said:

Glad to see the desert getting fleshed out. I think Massive might be an overstatement.

Still curious about the rogue.....

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I dont think its an overstatement, from 0 to 6 dungeons and a few dozen new unique named mobs, items, and recipes...not to mention unique resources that are only available in the desert. Half a dozen new mob types.

Either its half assed and I will be disappointed or its what I assume and has been months in the making...Lets wait and see how it looks next week I guess.

Hoping for Rogue PTR announcement a week or two after.

Desert changes are in and there is alot, I will be posting alot of images of the new dungeons and updates throughout the next two days as i explore it.

All trees are harvestable (palm, cactus, a few others), there are new mining nodes (obsidian and sandstone). Desert graphic updates as well as a bunch of new mobs and mob variety. Snake temple entrance below.

link to Jan development update ;

Leibowitz said:

link to Jan development update ;

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21:15 ish you can see me crash the dev party lol

I thought they were NPCs was trying to attack Steven

Spectre Island in the desert...people kiting spectres

Seems familiar...

5x speed firebrand kill from last night with our guild alliance on Lyneth server

meStevo said:

I finally called it for this session. I just don't have the time is all. Enjoyed what I've played so far, will be back later or next session to play w/ more additions.

I was in Iron Oceans S Sloan and being part of the alliance and helping manage nodes and working to build them up really was what made the game fun for me. Being a social sandbox style MMO, doing my part to further my guild and the alliance was a lot of fun.

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Oh nice, part of the desert alliance. Let me know when you get back to it.

Civ and Avowed coming out next few days / week...so ill be mostly afk farming mining nodes for a bit

Big drama on the Lyneth server tonight, 7 hour node war between our alliance's node and the guild Federation's node (leading guild on the server currently atleast until pirates decide to start doing something again).

The way the node wars work are whichever side kills 800 citizens of the other node first wins. Our alliance was winning and they resorted to making an alt a citizens of our node and chain killing them. Will see if the devs do anything about it, pretty big issue if not.

Look at the Derek kills Orrny messages, Orrny is the alt that was being chain killed.

Sloan said:

Big drama on the Lyneth server tonight, 7 hour node war between our alliance's node and the guild Federation's node (leading guild on the server currently atleast until pirates decide to start doing something again).

The way the node wars work are whichever side kills 800 citizens of the other node first wins. Our alliance was winning and they resorted to making an alt a citizens of our node and chain killing them. Will see if the devs do anything about it, pretty big issue if not.

Look at the Derek kills Orrny messages, Orrny is the alt that was being chain killed.

View attachment 573164View attachment 573165

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Short sighted in coding that, Im sure. Should have diminishing returns on a timer, or spawn the person further and further away after a set number of kills etc. Im sure its not intended and they'll change it for the better. But that is pretty shitty. Reminds me of all the petty / cheating type shit people used to do in New World's PVP.

Notes from Stevens Interview with Kaos & Lace 08/2/25:

Ashes of Creation MMO

Dynamic Gridding is code ready, and being actively tested, it will not come online until most server related bugs are fixed (mainly in relation to borders).

Desert pocket dungeons only unlock when the nearby node reaches level 3

POI's will be made available through story arcs and node quests

Questing structures will be predicated upon day/night cycles, node level, outcome of world events, acquisitions of resources and trade agreements between nodes

Story Arcs likely delayed to p3, earliest April.

Steven likely to stream Rogue on Monday before PTR's test

Steven likely to stream a Story Arc on Monday

Interior of buildings in nodes are placeholder and belong to the Kaelar race. Expect updates to these sometimes in phase 3
Housing to be implemented late p2/early p3. (Static in-node housing and instanced apartments)

Freeholds to receive monthly content implementation

Every class will have access to Tank and Cleric Augment schools when introduced.

Secondary Archetypes will be easily switched during p3 to allow for easier testing
Secondary Archetype augments will be passives applied to existing class abilities.
Secondary Archetype augments will be of varying power. (Steven gave an example of turning Fighters charge into a teleportation blink, akin to Mage, as a 7.5/10 of augment power)

Significant Artisan and Economy overhaul is expected right before p3 (Recipe changes, processing costs & speeds, localised resource implimentation, introduction of Freehold stations etc)

Sandsquall Desert to be completed by end of February

Vandagar Tropics & Turquoise Sea to be completed by end of March

Freehold wipes expected when the estates system comes online (freely placed)
Focused testing to remain on PTR, never on production
TTK to be addressed in the next 2 weeks
Potentially a reset of enchantments or compressed stats.
Don't expect any QoL fixes/content before Phase 3
Gliding to be implimented for mounts in Phase 3
Steven likes the idea to be able to impeach Mayors

Neranja said:

Do they still use UE server? If so, it may have been the wrong decision to use the generic implementation, which isn't really tailored to complex MMO gameplay. MMOs are basically elaborate graphical database clients.

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Sry missed this, was always UE5 servers.

Tomorrows patch, still no rogue. Rogue has been in PTR for 2 weeks now so should be hitting soon.

Neranja said:

Do they still use UE server? If so, it may have been the wrong decision to use the generic implementation, which isn't really tailored to complex MMO gameplay. MMOs are basically elaborate graphical database clients.


The downside of less instanced, less theme-parky gameplay is that you have to find your own way to play the game. With the current culture of "optimal way to play" guide websites plus Youtubers + Twitch streamers showing off their play, you will have a lot of people trying to emulate that, in turn crowding certain areas making them unplayable.

That is the downside of non-instanced content plus big servers. It worked back in the day because the servers were not as full, and not everyone knew what an Allakhazam and how to use it in the first place. So, not only did WoW kill that playstyle, it was also Thottbot.

Also, let's not dance around the elephant in the room: less private zones, less theme park , more "classic grind" as you put it, does not automatically imply PvP.


This right here is why I /consider dubiously on AoC. You basically describe "being a cog in a large nameless, facelss guid" so you can PvE--except you have to pay taxes of course. So I'm basically working for Amazon or Walmart, and the IRS wants money at the end of the year--only in a virtual world. Who would want that on the PvE side? Do I at least get an ingame pee bottle?

Again, this is New World all over, where guild could take over a trading post and set taxes. So players started to trade in items instead of coin.


Highly motivated players will find ways to fuck with other players. You should brush up on your knowledge about the psychology of PKs. They find enjoyment in destroying the fun for other players. And who cares about the corruption system when they can make alts and trade stuff, akin to a fence.

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It's not that Unreal is bad at MMOs, MMO developers almost always implement their own networking stacks. But this is a tremendous amount of work, something one would expect when developing an MMO.

The default networking in Unreal is for FPS games with 32 or fewer players, and that can be difficult to hit. Epic uses an alternative networking implementation for Fortnite called Replication Graph. This allows the dedicated server to handle 50k replicated actors (note that actor in this case is mostly simple objects, not players). Last I checked the game could handle 100 players before serious server CPU degradation hits.

Epic also has a new experimental networking stack called Iris, which fundamentally changes the networking to handle open world games and large player counts, and will completely replace the existing replication system which has its roots in the old Unreal Tournament games (push vs polling, reducing CPU load on a server).

Maybe Ashes devs are using some variation of replication graph, Iris or implemented their own stack on top of Enet or Raknet. This would allow you to use the game engine's server to handle collisions, and you could tie the networking thread event handler to blueprint events etc. Tooling for the editor which is tightly coupled to Unreal would also save time vs creating or using some other commercial MMO server stack, and creating a different set of tools from scratch. You wouldn't have to export mesh data from Unreal to an external server that handles collision when you could dig into the C++ code on the server to optimize it.

I see that these guys are trying to implement server meshing as well, which is just a fancy name for server to server proxy actor replication, something that isn't supported by Unreal but a basic version really shouldn't be too hard to implement (if you hire networking programmers who aren't retards). Using Unreal's built in tools and systems saves a shit ton of time when prototyping and nailing your game loop, and it's fine to use the dedicated server for MMOs but you're going to need to implement a heavily customized networking replacement to get good player counts and non zone line based world layout.

I need the tools to get good enough for me to build my own MMO.