Trials of Ascension, Shady Practices and the Big Crowdfunding Debate

[Deleted]

You probably played through vanilla all the way to MoP. You will reach a point where you've seen it all. I also played since launch, and quit raiding when WotLK came to an end. But the lore, additional gameplay features remain interesting. I like to be up-to-date on this game because I love the lore, and Blizzard games in general (Give Overwatch!). I will probably pick up WoD a few months along the path and enjoy the experience, but no more raiding.

[Edge-]

Let's keep the discussion off of WoW, folks. There are plenty of other forums for that.

[lawow74]

The bottom part really nails it with the ´what gamers want´.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertco...rtner=yahootix

Pretty much agree they've gone way overboard with monetizing games and trying to manipulate sales. Oh, who cares if the game is buggy and/or broken at launch? Pff, we can patch that anytime. Plus, you paid for it, that's all we care about. And trying to sidecar it with some mobile app bullshit is just...no. Stuff like this makes me wanna crack out an emulator and play the games of yore.

[Deleted]

New update!

http://trialsofascension.com/news/ga...s#.VGR_0X-9KSM

Much news!

PS: I dropped Ubisoft after the failure of Settlers 7.

[Vizardlorde]

So they are making a crappier version of ArcheAge's housing system? marvelous.

[lawow74]

Ooh, Trials of Construction! I can pay money to do virtually what I used to do IRL as a summer job. :P

Still pretty much just toilet paper dev notes. Enough talk about rules and limits to make it sound like they have some kind of underlying structure to it all. Plus some vague static 'screenshots'. Oh yes, and promises of an epic story through their Kickstarter. Yes, I'm sure there will be a story, and it will be epic. I just don't think they're going to like it.

[Deleted]

Just click the link, it's a TON of text, probably even more then when Teddy cried.

[Deleted]

They took it upon themselves to double their weekly lore output to two stories, and they're nearing completion of a massive story that will be revealed throughout our Kickstarter!

Two stories a week!!!!!!!

[Kyanion]

Wow all these "amazing" new crafting things yet there is just one problem. 66% of the races in the game CAN'T USE them.

[Azrile]

I love when they say they are not ready to show something in it´s pure glory.. then the put up a screenshot of the same spider as they had in their last video. Seriously.. they have one particle affect and one spider copied 4 times. yes yes, that is glory..

[Deleted]

I love when they say they are not ready to show something in it´s pure glory.. then the put up a screenshot of the same spider as they had in their last video. Seriously.. they have one particle affect and one spider copied 4 times. yes yes, that is glory..

You should be amazed. Their resident goblin did the animation for that spell.

It's probably just photo shopped now that I think about it, haha.

[Azrile]

Guys.. Major update to ToaS tonight. ( yes, 1.75 hours of actual work on a fake game). We have added the following

1. 8 spells, 1 that is a thermonuclear detonation.
2. 2 more spider models ( yes!! more kickstarter money)
3. A gorilla that shoots a fire spout spell out his butt
4. DRAGONS..... That is right.. we have already introduced baby dragons into our game that are capable of eating human alts....er... characters.

seriously.. less than two hours.

http://users17.jabry.com/trialsofascammer/

and yes, I fubbed up and forgot to turn shadows on before taking the screenshots and don´t feel like redoing fake work. I had to move Toas outside of our real game and was so amused at watching a gorilla spin through the air while shooting flames out his but that i forgot to set up the scene correctly before taking the SSs.

[Azrile]

I'm really disappointed with you azrile.
One of your spiders is a ant….

ah, sorry... we forgot to release our 2535 pages of lore that reveals that in our world.. ants are spiders. Our team of lorewriters are doing a bang up job and will convince you.

Really, the purple monster thingie isn´t a spider either. I just wanted to have more things to blow into the air without repeating models and also to play up the whole kickstarter = spiders x 750,0000. None of the spiders are useable in a real game. We are using the ant, but it will just be a critter on the ground. I think it is 70 tris, so you can put a lot of them in a scene. The other spiders are too high poly count to be ground clutter critters, but not high enough quality to be things you fight. I have a ton of ground clutter spiders, but if you size them up, they look terrible. It is one of the things I worked on a bit yesterday, adding butterflies, flies, spiders, ants and small snakes to the map. Not things you can kill or interact with, but just things that make the world move.

[Deleted]

Not impressed.

I will be once I can craft the Empire State Building or Eiffel Tower with my 500 guildmembers.

[Fallen Angel]

Lf someone to hold my copper bar so I can make a copper codpiece.

[Azrile]

and again. They have a forum poster working on their game for free. Explain again what the devs are actually doing other than posting on forums... and explain again where the $60k is being spent. Do they really think you can make a game using forum posters to do freebie bits and pieces.

If anyone would like to actually learn how to do this. Here is a unity training video ( less than an hour ) that will teach you how to do an explosion with force that moves things, has sound and adds a ´slow motion´ effect as the player walks away.

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/m...tic-explosions

and here is a link to the unity forums store where you can download 1000´s of free ´spells´ particle effects that you can drag-drop into your game. ( the nuclear explosion is part of one of these). For good measure, the first freebie pack on the page includes the waterfall that you saw in one of their earlier videos. All this is free, and all of it you can just drag into your project and it works ( prefabs already included)

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/e...1/sortby/price

It amazes me that they are trying to pass this stuff off as ´progress´ to their fans when it is stuff anyone here could do in a couple hours. This is not progress, this is doing the easiest .1% of a game to make it look like progress.

[Deleted]

Can you provide the direct link to that waterfall? I'd like to see it.

If it's too much hassle don't bother though, I'm merely curious

[Azrile]

Can you provide the direct link to that waterfall? I'd like to see it.

If it's too much hassle don't bother though, I'm merely curious

if you follow the assetstore link above, the first entry is a Water Fx pack that Unity added themselves, it contains rain, snow, steam and a water fall. It is the most popular particle effect download. The waterfall is done really well and a lot of people use it because it is easy to customize. It is a bit hard to explain, but also within that waterfall special effect is a splash effect that you can duplicate and place wherever the water hits rocks. So if you have a waterfall with many rocks sticking out, you just duplicate the splash and move it to where the rocks are and then the waterfall will look like it is hitting the rocks. Doesn´t even need to be a waterfall, you can use the same asset to make a stream, and then just shrink the size of the splash and rotate them a bit. and you have a fast moving stream splashing against rocks.

Not blaming them for using it since it is a good asset. But it just shows how much of the game you can build in 5 mins with a store asset.

[Deleted]

It amazes me that they are trying to pass this stuff off as ´progress´ to their fans when it is stuff anyone here could do in a couple hours. This is not progress, this is doing the easiest .1% of a game to make it look like progress.

A couple of decades ago this would have been progress, but - as a nice consequence of modular design - it's not anymore. Some people create stuff once and it can be used for hundreds of projects; it's basically become a shopping spree.

What needs to catch up is the perception some people have of it.

If you look at the principles of any modern industry, e.g. innovation (this one is overrated in my opinion), iteration, modular design, local impact of parameters (akin to wavelet bases), etc. ... there's nothing of this kind in ToA.
It's almost like it was pulled straight out of 2002's world.

[Deleted]

Fuck yeah, FC selling ballcaps now!