Ashes of the Singularity Playthrough w/ Brad Wardell and Rob Zacny

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

This is a stream done with Rock Paper Shotgun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iPk2bAz83k 

Two main points of interest for me:

1) They do plan to have different stances available for the battle groups. They sounded like behavioral ones rather than actual different formations but I could be wrong.

2) They discussed whether the game should let the player know the strength of the other players (The number next to the players' name).

Things related to the latter of these two interest me more at the moment. I remember being very surprised when I first started the game that you could see the starting positions of everyone and track the progress of them all as they captured the nodes. So we have all of that shown and the strength numbers shown...I think it is too much.

I have never once seen a player (online or on youtube) use the Pan to scout or the Hermes to really scout. There are obviously still reasons to use them but you can hardly blame the players for being lazy in this regard as they have so much information at their finger tips without doing anything.

My take is that you should not see what player starts where. It is a fun part of this kind of game to find out out who your neighbour is. It would also fun to be exploring and coming across the borders of the opposition and finding for yourself where they are and what nodes they have captured of if a node has changed hands since you last went past. Frogboy has said elsewhere that at the moment the game feels like you get everything too quickly. Well I think this is also part of that problem. If you don't want it as default please put it in as an option.

I am more ambivalent about the player strength points. This is straight out of the Civ series. It can work work well when you don't know where people are from the get-go and you just see that someone is really powerful. Then it is a "phew!" or a "oh ****!" moment when you find out if they are your neighbours or not, or when you see who is sending an army moving towards you. Obviously if you don't have access to the the player strength numbers you have to work out strengths of players yourself through scouting and such which is good too.

 

EDIT: Kinda funny when Rob wondered if the game was in slow motion or something. I was watching it at 1.5 speed on youtube (love that feature) so it hadn't crossed my mind at the time. At normal speed the lasers (brute) and machine gun like fire (hermes) look fine to me speed wise, but I can understand someone thinking some of the rockets/arching projectiles are in slowmo.

32,381 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

             Always fun watch them play

 

Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top


My take is that you should not see what player starts where. It is a fun part of this kind of game to find out out who your neighbour is. It would also fun to be exploring and coming across the borders of the opposition and finding for yourself where they are and what nodes they have captured of if a node has changed hands since you last went past. Frogboy has said elsewhere that at the moment the game feels like you get everything too quickly. Well I think this is also part of that problem. If you don't want it as default please put it in as an option.

 

Unless something is broken, this is an option (at least partially - once a node is discovered it stays discovered).

WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #3 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Hadn't seen this yet. Thanks for posting!

Reply #4 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Quoting TheRealWarpstorm, reply 2

My take is that you should not see what player starts where. It is a fun part of this kind of game to find out out who your neighbour is. It would also fun to be exploring and coming across the borders of the opposition and finding for yourself where they are and what nodes they have captured of if a node has changed hands since you last went past. Frogboy has said elsewhere that at the moment the game feels like you get everything too quickly. Well I think this is also part of that problem. If you don't want it as default please put it in as an option.
 

Unless something is broken, this is an option (at least partially - once a node is discovered it stays discovered).

"It would also fun to be exploring and coming across the borders of the opposition and finding for yourself where they are and what nodes they have captured of or if a node has changed hands since you last went past."

That should have been an "or" in case that threw you. What I meant is I would like to update it myself. So perhaps when I was first in that area it was red owned, then when i fly over it again say, it updates and changes to blue. At the moment it is all automatic and you don't have to do any exploring or scouting for this kind of intel.

 

There is now a write up of the interview with Brad on Rock Paper Shotgun:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/11/10/ashes-of-the-singularity/

No comment on the writing but those screenshots look like low quality screen grabs. I do feel that the terrain in the game is a bit drab, but those blurred low-res pictures are not a fair representation of what the game looks like, which is a shame.