The most ambitious MMORPG of the near future “is another scam,” many players believe

When it comes to the most exciting MMORPGs of the next few years, Ashes of Creation is a must. Despite potentially revolutionary features, modern graphics and regular updates from the developers, large parts of the community suspect it is just another scam that will never work.

What is the mood in the community? Over the past few days, there has been a vote on the website mmorpg.org.pl about the assessment of the MMORPG Ashes of Creation.

  • About 55 percent of participants voted “Ashes of Creation is another scam that will never work.”
  • Almost 31 percent, however, said that they were initially enthusiastic, but lost interest or hope for a good game over the long development period.
  • The remaining 14 percent expressed their continued anticipation for Intrepid Studios’ online role-playing game.
  • With 1,334 participants, this is of course only a relatively small sample. But this overall picture fits with the frustration of parts of the community, which MeinMMO had already reported on in August after the developers of Ashes of Creation had announced the prices for access to the upcoming alpha test phase.

    Here’s the most important thing about Ashes of Creation in just 49 seconds:

    Ashes of Creation: The most important things in a nutshell

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    The curse of ambitious MMORPGs

    Why is faith in Ashes of Creation waning? A mix of different factors is responsible for this:

  • Ashes of Creation was announced in 2016, and the release was originally supposed to be in 2019. Now it is 2024. The first phase of Alpha 2 is scheduled to start in October. Phase 3 is planned for May 2025 and will then run for about another year. Whether there will only be the beta in 2026 or also a final launch is up in the air.
  • Ashes of Creation was originally touted as a next-generation MMORPG, and the switch to Unreal Engine 5 underlined that claim. However, due to the long development time, players fear that the online RPG will no longer feel like a next-generation MMORPG at launch – a curse that the genre has long struggled with.
  • It is now clear that Ashes of Creation will have a strong focus on PvP, which many MMORPG fans dislike. And even PvP fans criticize how Ashes of Creation handles the damage caused to characters in PvP battles.
  • Intrepid owes the fact that such a long development period with such a large team is possible thanks to the players who have invested a lot of money in crowdfunding campaigns and backer packages – similar to Star Citizen. However, the way in which the new alpha packages were to be monetized met with a lot of criticism.
  • What makes AoC different from other MMORPGs that are accused of cheating? In the past decade, there have been several online role-playing games whose development was supposed to be financed through crowdfunding and which have not yet been released or have only been released in a disastrous state – which has repeatedly led to accusations of scams:

  • Camelot Unchained, by veteran developer Mark Jacobs, has been in development since 2012, but for a long time made little progress. At one point, the studio was even working on another game, which got many supporters riled up. Now the MMORPG is due to be released at the end of 2025. Nobody really believes it.
  • First Kickstarter success, then development stopped, layoffs and lawsuits. Chronicles of Elyria has had a turbulent decade. All the more so because the brain behind the game, Jeromy Walsh, has never completely buried the project and keeps asking for money to finish CoE. But after all these years he really has nothing to show for it.
  • At least Shroud of the Avatar by Richard Garriott was released. However, the “finished” product and the Kickstarter goodies delivered had little to do with what the developer legend had promised at the start of the crowdfunding campaign. Fans put around 15 million dollars into the project. The reward was mainly frustration and disappointment.
  • Ashes of Creation will have a strong PvP focus – you can attack other players’ caravans or you have to defend yours from others:

    Ashes of Creation – Caravan gameplay

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    Ashes of Creation differs from all these examples in several ways.

  • The people in charge at Intrepid have been publishing comprehensive monthly developer updates in video form for a long time. Not only do these prove that Ashes of Creation is making clear progress in all areas, but what is shown – in terms of graphics quality, for example – makes you want more. Videos from the development of Camelot Unchained and the like, however, were mostly daunting.
  • In all the years that Ashes of Creation has been in development, there has been no dire news about development problems, internal disputes, or necessary layoffs.
  • On the contrary, Intrepid has been continuously hiring for many years. In addition to studio head and creative director Steven Sharif, there are also many other employees who have been there from the beginning, such as Margaret Krohn (Director of Communications).
  • Thanks to the numerous gameplay presentations of the past few years, you can now get a pretty good idea of ​​what kind of game Ashes of Creation will be and how, for example, the potentially genre-defining node system or the server foundation will work. That’s more than Camelot Unchained and Co. have managed to achieve so far.

    Hopefully Alpha 2 this year and next year will show whether all of this not only sounds good and looks promising, but also works in the MMORPG environment. MeinMMO will be there for you if possible and will report whether the ambitious online role-playing game can tap into the potential suggested. Ashes of Creation shows huge raids like in World of Warcraft – even with dragons

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