With Ashes of Creation Alpha 2 Phase 3 finally on the cusp of launch, developer Intrepid Studios has lifted the lid on arguably its most significant features, towns and crates. The highly ambitious MMORPG is about to make its settlements much bigger and more impressive, and is introducing a new in-game representation of goods transportation that will be a key part of player guilds building and managing these towns. To talk through the features, creative director Steven Sharif and director of communications Margaret Krohn are joined by director of design Bill Trost and senior game designer Chris Justo.
As Intrepid continues to hone Ashes of Creation, the step into its next phase of alpha testing makes a major jump forward with the introduction of level-four nodes (the individual regions on each server realm). This will allow players to build full-scale towns to rival even the developer-made equivalents found in many of our best MMORPGs. The livestream starts with discussion about the ongoing improvements Sharif previously mentioned when he announced the Phase 3 delay, including the Anvils starting area, server performance, time-to-kill, and the first-time user experience. The real meat we’re here for begins at the one-hour mark, however.
“This is exciting because we haven’t had an update to node stages in quite some time,” Sharif remarks. The team recently cut one of its planned tiers, ‘metropolis,’ from the settlement progression, meaning that towns are now the penultimate stage before we eventually reach full-scale cities. Right from the start, towns are immediately a huge change from the current villages, as our in-game preview starts outside the towering stone walls of a place named ‘Kal Torhum’ and its imposing main gate.
“Towns are significantly bigger,” Justo says, doubling the size from the two in-world ‘cells’ of villages up to four for towns. When factoring in static, in-node housing, that number could well double again. I’m immediately taken by the scale as the developers ride through the entryway; stone-brick buildings line the cobbled streets, and it strongly reminds me of visiting old medieval towns across the United Kingdom. Sharif has something else in mind, however, calling quick attention to the packs everyone is carrying on their backs.
This is the crate system in action, a fundamental new part of Ashes of Creation that’s a more grounded overhaul of cargo. These boxes range from personal crates to store your own gear to construction crates filled with building materials, and commodity crates that can be taken to ports, other nodes, or into lawless zones as requested to earn rewards. Crates are designed “to make more and more things feel like they are happening in a real world,” Trost explains, although adds that this comes with the caveat of “always favoring gameplay over reality.”
Crates represent resources being physically moved around Verra, and come in various sizes. You’ll be able to transport them on your back as you travel, or put them onto ships or caravans. They’re visible in game, meaning other players can see what you’re carrying, although killing someone to steal their supplies is considered a hostile PvP action and will inflict the same corruption mechanics as any regular instance of troublemaking in Ashes of Creation.
The team are carrying construction crates today, and Justo leads them over to a laboratory in town wrapped in scaffolding and tarps. It’s close to completion of an expansion, and a menu shows that just three crates are required to finish the project. In total, it looks like three different resource types have been delivered already – 100 crates of one, 33 of another, and 64 of the 67 needed from the variant being submitted now. Once everything’s turned in, there’s a short period while the upgrade finishes.
Sharif then opens the node menu and looks through Kal Torhum’s bulletin board, where he can inspect all of the building plots individually. Here you can see the required weekly maintenance costs, along with big upgrade trees for each structure that let you choose how you want to specialize. “We’re going to need a lot more crates,” Trost jokes. You’ll also see smaller ‘node XP’ construction projects that appear automatically around the town, which will provide a bump of experience to the overall node when completed.
Next, we look at a commodity crate, more specifically a ‘Crate of Succulent Fruit.’ This, the tooltip explains, can be delivered to the market commodity vendor in a given node to sell it for gold. With a click, Sharif pulls up a pricing comparison, showing how far away each node is and what it’s currently prepared to pay for the goods in question.
The towns are certainly impressive, offering a level of player-led creativity that outstrips anything seen in the new World of Warcraft housing or FF14’s Island Sanctuary. I’m most reminded of my time building a guild stronghold in Neverwinter, but on an even bigger and bolder scale. There’s still a long, long way to go before Ashes of Creation reaches its full release, but what’s already here makes me eager to see if Intrepid can pull it off.
Ashes of Creation Alpha 2 Phase 3 launches on Tuesday August 26. Taking part in the ongoing alpha requires a key starting at $100, which also includes future beta access, a month of game time, and $15 worth of Ashes of Creation’s in-game marketplace currency, Embers.
In the meantime, the best building games will let you put those construction skills into practice. Want to make sure you’re able to do all that scale justice? Perhaps it’s time to grab the best graphics card for your budget in 2025.
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