18 whole minutes of talking out my ass! impressive! I opted in to a more... complete experience rather than an Intro for today's video, using more edits and skits during the midroll! Lemme know if you enjoyed it or if you'd rather just a traditional intro like normal :) Also, the watch party invite is LIVE in the discord: discord.gg/muwNp8NhbB
Yes it was a good video m8! I absorbed all the information. But i enjoy all your videos! I think you have the instinct to make videos for any given time. For any circumstance. Keep going!
Indeed. He started as a normal nerd and leveled up over the last 2 years into a full blown, fully developed, split personality. I have loved watching every minute of it.
If every spell is too much, then none are unique or dazzling. They should do as you suggest, but make a couple a little more dazzling like rezzes or really big hitting spells on longer cooldowns.
Yep, it's important that simple spells have simple graphical effects and higher level/more powerful spells have more dramatic ones. Also a lot of MMOs have the problem where when you have 20+ people casting spells at something you can't see wtf is going on because there's just too many explosions/etc. going on. Simple is definitely best for so many reasons
I like this style. If you're going to baselessly speculate, might as well be as epic story telling. Looking forward to supporting you on Patreon, if and when this is possible.
Oh man I remember walking from the dwarf area to Stormwind at level 10 because I didn’t know about the tram. It probably took me 2 hours to survive through it
The way you describe the possibilities in great details and the potential of adventure and story telling is amazing! Makes me even more excited about this game and its potential.
I love how the big name streamers and MMO youtubers have been referencing your channel so much. I think there's every reason to believe that this channel is going to explode in popularity some day.
For me i feel like fancy visuals don't matter on their own, they need solid audio to really make them special. Edit, New World's hammer audio and visuals were ogasmic.
exactly. the audio was really one of the few redeeming features new world had. i remember simply mining iron in this sort of valley area, and just hearing the sound of the metal echoing off the rocks was so immersive for me.
it would be cool for an event where the fog is so thick, you can't see past more than like 5 feet in front you, no hp bars or target markers, really reduces everything.
Lost ark has that mechanic with darkness. It's awful, lol. But then again it's different if it's used for mainly atmosphere and exploration. LA did it with a boss which easily one shot. Tastefully added would be great, but I think I see what your getting at. Lots of potential!
0:24 🤣😅 one of the main reasons why I'm here and your funny content that has me laughing with big barrel chest laughs. Keep serving the copium with a bucket size laddle. Cheers!
Things like Nanite and Lumen will increase the speed at which assets and environments can be assembled by simply removing tedious portions of the process. Features like World Partition and Data Layers allow multiple people to work on an environment in parallel without having merge conflicts, WP in particular allows an artist to load only the part of the world they need to make changes to. This is likely a better solution than what Intrepid came up with in house. Intrepid are, however, creating their own tools for speeding up development. They managed to get the mesh for each player down to a single draw call including mounts by merging all the myriad of meshes that a player can have. Their Landform tool allows them to create auto displacement maps and manipulate textures in engine; I speculate that they are using UE5's asset library (including Quixel) in conjunction with this tool. They also recently talked about the tool that breaks down abilities into modular, swappable components in the melee video. The analogy they used was like being able to assemble abilities like Lego bricks.
Lumen will wreck even mid-end modern PCs, so it wont be as useful as it would be a for a closed system like a console. They will need lower end lighting features for those who want the extra performance or those who will need it to run the game.
It's going to be a candy show for sure. Remember it's easier to tone down the effects later than to have to build them up later. I think where this is going to really shine is during the cinematic cut scenes we're going to get during play....and I can't wait! Keep the great vids coming!!!
Elden Ring made me realize how important timing is in attacks. Not the dodge windows and mechanics. The actual timing of the animations and how they correlate with dodge windows etc. I really hope AOC can nail this feeling. It makes the game feel satisfying.
Thanks for all the content Narc. Been subbed for a few weeks now and I've watched most of your videos, hopefully you've made at least $7.65 off me in ad revenue. I'll need all the content I can get on Ashes to forget that its years away and that I'm simply high on copium
That was awesome! Loved it! I wonder if spell effects can be turned up for solo play and turned down for group engagement automatically. For open world solo play it would be fun and so much more immersive to have "heavy" visual effects!
banger of a video. its a long one too, ty. I think the graphics of AOC need to push the boundaries of what we're currently getting, for sure. However, they need to do it while also lowering the minimum spec requirements as much as they can. They don't have to do both at the same time, they just need to have a really high maximum quality, and a minimum quality that looks ok enough while allowing people to play on their shitter laptops.
All I really wish for is decently realistic lighting/weather. Which mostly comes down to actual darkness when it's night time. (maybe able to turn it off in the graphics for pvp for instance.) It doesn't have to be "so dark I can barely make out shapes without my lantern", but at least "my lantern gives a noticeable difference to visibility near me." But also when it rains it's not just "there's some raindrops now", but "the sky/lighting turns greyer and a bit darker. Maybe the wind picks up a bit more. And the rain lowers visibility farther out." The fog mechanics in the video are also a good example, even if a lesser version for performance reasons.
I really enjoyed this video. UE5 still has so many unknowns and the potential shown is huge. Very keen to see what Intrepid and other game devs can pull off with it.
Allow me to add to the engagement stats for you Narc... Not sure how taxing Lumen is, but Nanite is supposed to enable nearly infinite geometric detail on today's average hardware. Lumen does not make use of RT cores on Nvidia cards (yet), because its designed with all (current and next-gen) platforms/hardware in mind. Its essentially highly optimized hybrid ray-tracing+voxel-cone and global illumination tech based on RayTracing. Nanite unfortunately does not support translucency or masked materials at this point in time, so many objects like grass and leaves would still be made with existing techniques. I wonder how much of the rendering will be baked and how much of the world and effects will be live. UE5 is undoubtedly revolutionary tech in many ways. The networking tech that Intrepid is going to have to use needs to be just as revolutionary. Inteprid wouldn't use the tech if it wasn't viable for their project. I think we'd have to trust them on that for now. There will be UE5 games coming out before AoC, but I don't know any of this scale. Also, AoC is only a decade away from release now so... I have to agree about spell effects, but only when it blocks the vision on game mechanics like boss attacks. I wouldn't mind them if I can just turn them down or if they can be dynamic. E.g The more players in the area the less visual effects are displayed on screen. This way I can still experience full fidelity in a small group setting.
As a future Necromancer main, I would love to have an ultimate ability or even a stance that incorporates that green smoky effect. Like if I can upkeep my enough lifesteal or channel enough death, my armor starts to glow and the effect grows until I run out of stuff to kill or mana/life force to continue to cast my spells. Like I want people to KNOW that a powerful Necromancer is nearby by the effect that I have on the environment.
@@joshk5206 I like that idea as well. And being able to track me easier makes for a way to balance all of my awesome strength. Im imagining a group trying to take me down and following my trail while I'm killing mobs during my escape to get more death charges. They're trying to catch me before I kill too many more only to find me pulsing with power in a dense fog of death flanked by the zombies of the mobs I killed, a few demons and a towering lich ready to take them all on.
It’s about time we seen some modern tech in an MMO that actually works, considering the last best MMO ( IMO ) was classic - litch king it’s about time we seen some fresh modern tech. Looking forward to getting to play this game, I just hope it lives up to all of our expectations !
I think art style is way more important than graphical fidelity at this point. I mean you say that WoW looks primitive, but it had its own style that stood out from the pack and it's one that I still enjoy today. At the minute Ashes just looks like every other UE game. But gameplay is even more important than that so it's hardly a dealbreaker for me.
I don't think it looks that generic, kill the realistic lighting and I think you'd see more of the artstyle pop out, if that's a sacrifice worth making. Tbf though I've not seen too many unreal engine games but I'm pretty sure the lighting is what's making it look like other unreal games. I agree that artstyle is often more important than pure high end graphics, though.
I don't mind huge spell effects for bosses, mobs and the environment, but I prefer player effects be somewhat toned down. Regarding graphics, the most important thing to me is feeling immersed. Fluid movement and effects, creative design, etc. I'll even say that modern WoW has decent enough graphics to get immersed in the world (if their worldbuilding wasn't so shit :/ ) but I think AoC can do better with these new techs.
Most important thing is that the effects look beautiful, but are subject to lower graphics/intensity. So everybody can make their own settings perfect for their PC. Also very important to make them not blinding like you said. You should be able to differentiate between different spells/skills instead of it being 1 massive glare.
It would be interesting if siege gameplay is effected by the weather. Can you imagine if it started raining and suddenly you are having to deal with a muddy terrain effecting your movement. or fog rolling in an suddenly your view distance is reduced.
Basicly yes. Ashes is not a game that you will play for a year, but for a decade or more. In that time computational power has overcome the problems of the sfx. While it might be problematic at release, it will not be problematic a few years in. And having the details done now frees up time in the future.
Yeah the Fluid Ninja stuff is ultra impresive (and has been updated for years though UE4 etc.), they gave away the offline version free earlier in the year. Obviously syncing the simulation where it would be required for gameplay is far beyond possible, but all the other effects it's not bad at all. Interacting directly with lumen doesn't seem super likely but to be fair a proxy light would cover nearly all the effects you'd likely use just fine. Usually it's RAM that runs out before other resources for large scale sims, but even that's not too bad (compared to modern cards memory), and nanite scaling allows you to maybe reduce the texture load if you're expecting the player to be focused on the pretty volumetic effects. Epic have their own version fermenting too, so when such effects start turning up in fortnite you know they're not far of a UE5 release. The oceanology plugin has a larger scale version that's looks pretty great for water effects, and can do things like water pooling that is just nuts for real time rendering.
Very impressive of your ass talking that much but you are right, the way graphic engines are excelling in realism for a game that doesn't even exist is very exciting for the future generations of gamers.
I say they should make all the effects as fancy and colorful as they want, just make sure to have plenty of optimization features for the players with lower spec pcs. I'm hoping that's the approach they take since they have said on occasion giving "options" to the players is best.
One thing they could do is vary /where/ the spell effect is most pronounced, so that spells have a variety that produce a big effect at the point of the caster, versus others that have a big explosion/impact effect, and others are notable as they fly through the air, so you have less clutter in any one location. High-quality but subtle effects would be the ideal. I definitely want to feel like my ultimate looks rad and gets attention from time to time!
I think that spell and attack animations and visuals should increase in complexity and fidelity in accordance to the level and type of the attack or spell. An attack that can be spammed and used often should have a less complex animation than a spell that takes a minute to charge up and a long cooldown. This would help with threat assessment and since the over the top animations can't be spammed it will have a beneficial impact on performance. Also, a level 1 fireball shouldn't look the same as a level 50 version of the spell.
That's flip fluids it's built in unreal but it's not a part of it. The creator owns that software it's not apart of unreal. Ashes devs would need to buy the commercial license for it to use it legally
I believe this MMO will be a huge hit that lasts for years and years. When you are putting your own money on the line, you will do whatever it takes to make sure it succeeds. They know exactly what the player base wants because they are the player base and with no coperate over lords they can take their time to make sure everything is just the way they want it
I loved the detailed immersion of those scenarios that you described, leaning into an actual showcase of some of the visual possibilities from UE5 and speculatively discussing how it could work in the game. Phenomeneal video man! Well done. ~Nice trousers.
A sudden urge to frame those pants has occurred. Making a INT + WIS detect solutions check with the range of critical failure over -200 points… I think I really need some heavily magic-soused glasses here. Otherwise reality hands my ass to me.
Yes, visuals are important. If the game is good looking, it will be more appealing to the player. Visuals being good doesn't mean they need to be realistic but they need to follow a style and need to be well done. Unreal engine 5 is really good, not sure it will be revolutionary but their technology is really usefull to make games look incredible.
Yes. It's worth pushing the boundaries, and if what the devs using UE5 have claimed is true. Well, we should be able to run these graphics on a calculator 🤞🏻
I def want next gen graphic in the next mmo, tbh im sure they can make it so potatoes can run it with most effects turned off. But it would be so immersive to finally have a new good looking world to explore. im dying for a new good mmo.
More than spell effects, character animation is the most important thing. It's something FFXIV does super well. Even if you completely disable spell effects, you can determine what ability a given Job is using just by the characters movements. Dragoons are a good example. You'll see them doing all sorts of acrobatic movements even with zero particle effects. Black Mages have a lot of visual flair in the way they use their staff to cast. Really hoping Ashes can emulate that instead of the more traditional finger wiggles for everything with the only differentiation in what the caster is doing coming from the particle colors lol.
I'm actually of the mind that visuals should be high quality but there should be a slider to reduce it from Next Gen to Vanilla WoW, and be *very much tied to the power of the ability*. A fireball from a level 1 mage should look pathetic next to a level 50 mage's fireball.
Well good visuals are nice and all, but I'm more interested in movement&animation, how fluid the motion and combat feels, does the weapon swing have enough impacts, does it have just the right amount of recoil, how do the legs move when you side steep? Does it feel floaty because the feet don't actually touch the ground because the character model animations are separate from the world interactions etc and so on.