Ashes of Creation Rethinks the MMO Grouping Paradigm

9:17 PM July 24, 2017

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ashes-1-560x320 Ashes of Creation Rethinks the MMO Grouping Paradigm

What You Need to Know:

Ashes of Creation is the upcoming MMORPG from Intrepid Studios who've also dipped their hand in other major hit titles such as Planetside 2, EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies just to name a few. In this article we'll be taking a look at their "Group Dynamics" which dives deeper into the thoughts and ideas that the team has developed in order to make Ashes to Creation rise above the rest. Much of it looks at approaching grouping, roles, loots and more.
We'll leave you with a little snippet of what was written in the official blog, but be sure to check out the Ashes of Creation website to see everything in detail!

Source: Official Press Release

Group Dynamics

PARTY ROLES

*This is taken straight from the blog.

Now we’re talking – this is the nitty gritty of group dynamics in Ashes of Creation. While we’re including traditional Tank, DPS, and Support roles our secondary class system and augments system make customizing your character of the utmost import. We want players and their builds to feel malleable in Ashes of Creation. We never want you to feel pigeonholed into a single role, but at the same time we want roles and customization choices to be meaningful. So how do we maintain flexibility in character growth while making sure roles are important?

The traditional roles are the high concepts our classes fall into, but a better way to think of them are as tools that each class can use to help their comrades in arms. Enter Augments – this is how you’ll diversify and personalize your character outside of its primary role, or double down on its primary role – the choice is yours. A tank might be able to make a wall, blocking monsters into an area where only he can be hit. A damage specialist might have skills that create weaknesses in their enemy, letting everyone do more damage in turn. A support class might be able to bolster your allies with magic, hardening them against the ruthless foes that seek to strike you down.

GROUP SIZE

In Ashes of Creation, we’re going big. Our current party size is sitting at eight (8) players for a single group. While that number could change before launch, it’s serving a particular goal we have for gameplay. We like the idea of having a larger party because we want to put the massive back in Massively Multiplayer. If people just want to play with four others, they can always play their favorite MOBA. The idea behind an 8-person group is to allow us to really amplify party roles, and to create a need for each of the archetypes in every party.

We can get pretty creative with encounters if we build for a representative from each of those roles. Each Archetype has a valuable utility that applies to exploration and adventure which will help dungeons and other content go more smoothly. We want to allow for well-rounded parties to be rewarded for diversity and inclusion when people are determining party composition. The flipside is that it is a lot more work to balance toward eight-person groups, and having a higher number than normal cause availability issues for people if their social circles are smaller. With our concurrent server sizes, however, we expect to see large populations to pull from when forming groups. Expect this to get a lot of attention in our playthroughs and in the Alpha phases.