[2024] Feedback From a Casual Player

Yes, I’m one of the casual MMO players which discovered the game 4 years ago through Asmongold, a specific niche of the audience everyone is always warning about how the game is not being developed for at all, playing not more than 2 hours per weekday on average.

That being said my feedback here today is only the very best. This doesn’t mean at all the game is incredible, it’s an Alpha 2 overall. Yes, i’ve been going through hours of queue, crashes, major graphic bugs, party forming issue and I’m also not at all ignoring the huge amount of content missing in many aspects such as questing, classes and etc. All I did was align extremely well my expectations for this weekend and this is something I highly suggest for anyone considering to support the game development in the next 3-4 years.

My expectations for this weekend were a game in a stage that it would be barely playable per say, I had in mind a “testing and that’s it” objective and it was heavily surpassed. Not only was I able to play the game for the last three days, I also had a LOT of fun. Logging in to Ashes today feels like foreseeing early stages of a game to play for a lifetime. It scratches an itch that hasn’t been since I was playing Tibia in 2005, Knight Online in 2007 or Perfect World in 2009, thee games I played for 10+ years with much love for their original products. A game that feels that will become grindy in the best possible way, with huge chunks of content aimed towards social activity, heavy politics landscape and a cozy place to just be there overall.

And I’m not even part of the audience of the games mostly mentioned by Steve and Intepid as a reference like ArcheAge (never played) and LineAge II (played for a little while). The game has still such a huge road ahead but I can already see the placeholders for everything that I loved from MMOs 15 years ago such as the ones I mentioned. The innovation seems to be on the systems (I can’t emphasize enough how excited I am for how nodes system will shape the game in the future, for example), but also learning a lot from what already worked in the past (I never played Mages and it had the worst feedback, do I need to say i’m loving it anyway?).

Happy to do my part reporting bugs and playing a lot to generate data of what works well or not, and more than excited for Intrepid’s work specially in the next couple of years to enable a game playable by a wider audience and shape even more what they intend for it. Loving how the games create this “mandatory group content” enabling higher level content for groups at any moment through party grind, but at the same time I can just sit down in a equal level spot and grind solo, way less efficiently, for hours as well just having fun (if I would give a suggestion would be this: please keep the game focused on group content, while also creating solo environments. Sometimes I don’t give a f about efficiency, I just want to have fun). And I haven’t even stepped deeper into PvP which I love, so I know there will be a lot of frustration but it feels most games are running from any sort of friction becoming brain dead games, frustration is a black hat gamification necessary to keep engagement in the long run.

Sorry for the huge wall of text, but with so much worrying around casual players and players driven by influencers, I felt it was appropriate to leave a feedback from a success case. Thank you for the work done and count on me for helping improve it, excited for how this is going to look a few years down the road as I’ll definitely be there!