When I first heard about Ashes of Creation, I was confused and thought to myself “Wait a second, Ashes of the Singularity has an MMO spin-off?”
Well, a few seconds of googling and I realized that I’m a complete dolt. Actually, Ashes of Creation is a rather new and interesting MMO that’s coming out, one that’s very ambitious.
What Is Ashes of Creation?
Like any large-scale and ambitious MMO that’s in an Alpha state, it’s somewhat hard to explain what’s going on.
In essence, some deep and dark force wiped out a previous civilization and retreated back into the mysterious holes, laying around for millennia (I think? Could be a century). Now though, civilization has started crawling its way back to life and those forces are slowly resurging. Think of it sort of like the Reapers in Mass Effect, there’s a large powerful force that’s coming for any form of advanced life.
The world itself is pretty massive, and that’s actually one of the marketing points of the game ‘Putting massive back into massive multiplayer online’. The world is broken up into different zones, with each zone having a node that you can effect as a player. Essentially each node acts as a build point for civilization, starting out as a small village it can grow into a big city as you level it up.
That being said, we don’t know anything about minimum requirements. Still, you will probably need a potent gaming CPU and at least a high-quality RX 580 to run this MMO.
Ashes of Creation Progression Explained
How do you level it up you ask? Well, you do that by taking on quests and missions within that node’s zone. As you gain experience and bandy about, the node gains exp as well and slowly levels up over time. This opens up new features such as new or different crafting stations, as well as a player house which you can own. Leveling up a node also unlocks new quests and monsters for you to fight, so you’re incentivized to play the game to get more game.
There’s a twist though; there’s a limit to how many nodes and be worked on and progressed at any given time. This ultimately means that lower leveled zones are compelled to attack higher leveled zones, and of course, the reverse is true in that those in higher-level zones will have to defend their nodes. There’s actually a whole siege mechanic that’s going to be added to the game so it will be full-on, big battles.
Of course, after talking about big battles, I’m sure you’re wondering if the game is full PvP and if there’s any PvE content. Well, you’re in luck! Ashes of Creation is doing a mix of both, with the aforementioned siege mode being part of the PvP world. In the smaller scale PvP there’s going to be duels and things of that nature, and you can actually attack any player, but if they don’t attack back and you kill them, you get a bunch of debuffs, and become corrupted, which highlights you in the map for bounty hunters to find you.
Ashes of Creation PvP
The PvP system is also tied into the trading of the game that takes the form of caravans. Since you don’t get a huge massive inventory to carry one thousand ore or whatever, you might need to hire an NPC caravan to transfer items to a node where you can use them (such as a smith). Players can definitely attack those caravans and can choose to defend it if you so wish, so there’s PvP on that front.
Ashes of Creation: Class Overview
Now all of this is super fascination I’m sure, but I think what you’re probably more interested to know is how does the role-playing game portion of this game work.
The game will have 8 classes from you to pick from, all the choices that you’d typically expect from an MMORPG of this type.
There’s also going to be 8 races from you to pick from, although the world and gameplay aren’t going to be faction locked like WoW is. In fact, as far as I can tell, there really is no faction system aside for things like guilds (that will have an upper limit of 300 people). So you’re really free to pick whatever race and class you feel the most comfortable with and just roll with it from there.
Ashes of Creation Professions
There’s also going to be crafting professions in the game, which they refer to as artisan class. These classes can generally follow one of three paths; Crafting, Gathering, and Processing. Going down each path opens different professions related to those paths. For example, if you want to do alchemy, that’s through the processing path and farming would be through the Gathering path.
Also, the crafting system in the game is made so that you can’t fully maximize everything, even though you can freely choose how you go down the path. This means that you can do a bit of everything or you can put all your focus down one path and become an artisan, which unlocks the higher-end stuff. Unfortunately, there’s not much more information about the crafting system, although it does sound rather interesting.
Finally, gaining exp is done by pretty much anything you do, such as crafting, killing, or completing quests. We don’t know if there’s going to be a level cap, multi-classing or what exactly, but considering how they are approaching crafting, I’d assume that you can’t just master everything.
Ashes of Creation: Early Access Preview
Well, it’s certainly playable and from all the videos out there, it looks reasonably good for what is essentially a pre-alpha.
Right now the game has one major mode that they are building off of called Apocalypse. It’s basically just a Battle Royal so nothing too fancy, but the idea is to slowly add to the mode until the game gets to its full potential. Since it is a BR, there’s no real classes or anything in the game as far as I can tell, it’s mostly just your run of the mill BR.
You know, I talk sort of talk about it offhandedly but for a pre-alpha of an MMO, it’s actually gone quite a long way, even if what’s available right now is only a BR mode. Actually, right now they’re working on adding Siege and Horde mode, the latter of which is essentially a wave defense mode. While there’s no specific release date on those, it seems to be what they’re mostly focusing along with Alpha 1.
Speaking of Alpha 1, it’s the first big update to the game that adds the MMO part of the game. It will have a ton of stuff from player leveling and housing, the introduction of nodes, questing, guilds, and really the full gamut of what an MMORPG is all about. You know, instead of me listing off a bunch of stuff, you can check out what Alpha-1 will have on their wiki.
How to Play Ashes of Creation
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering how you can play it and unfortunately, there’s not a lot of chances for that. You can register for the Apocalypse open beta tests, but those don’t really happen often as far as I can tell, so you might be waiting a while.
You could also drop some money in their shop to get ‘early access’, with different tiers of access. The lowest tier at $75 will get you the access, starting with Beta 2 testing and the second-highest tier at $250 give you access to Alpha-2. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to access Alpha-1 unless you were a backer (in which case, what are you doing here? Go and play the game!).
Unfortunately, Alpha-1 hasn’t even been released yet, as I alluded to earlier, so even if you drop $250, you’re likely to not be able to play it for quite some time.
Ashes of Creation: Release Date
Well, we aren’t quite sure when the full release is coming out, with the developers being intentionally vague so as not to miss a deadline or overpromise. That being said, I’d guess that the full release isn’t coming out until at least 2022 or maybe even 2023.
Of course, you can try your luck with open beta and spending money on early access.
Ashes of Creation: News & Rumors
Update as of August 1st, 2019:
Unfortunately, it seems that Alpha 1, which was slated to come out in Q2 of 2020, is going to be postponed by the developers to some later date. We haven’t been given a specific date and the head of the game, Steven Sharif, had this to say about it:
“Quarter two is no longer going to be the proposed date for alpha one delivery. The delay will not be in a number of years it’ll be in a number of months. However we are not going to-[sic] we give this commitment going forward to the community that when we give you a date we are going to be confident 100% that we can hit that date, which means that those core systems will need to be complete and stood up in a QA format or setting to where we are confident that that date’s going to be deliverable“
Final Words
Ashes of Creation has got many people excited. If you are excited to the point that you’d pay hundreds of dollars to support the devs and start playing now, then go for it. If not, you might be disappointed with the recent delays.
So, even though Alpha 1 is getting delated, at least it’s getting delayed for a relatively good reason; a high-quality release.
If you aren’t a type of person that likes to wait, you might get your dose of adventuring by checking out popular games like Stardew Valley or even Fortnite or PUBG.