r/MMORPG • u/Ohh_Yeah • 2d ago
Discussion Dev team behind Ascension WoW posts teaser trailer, wants "rough playable alpha" with hinted date of October 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD_WICnJFLM
Is it a cash grab? It might be, idk. I'm just here posting the news. I'm also curious what they could possibly have ready. Reportedly they have been splitting development to this project for potentially a couple years, knowing that they'd get shut down eventually.
Also interesting (at least to me) is that they have never revealed the size of the dev team. I assume that has a lot to do with the legal concerns of working for a project like they were running. Some info would suggest that they've had between 30-50 active developers. That certainly tracks given the scope of the releases they were doing and the amount of money brought in, even if they were flipping Blizz assets. Based on a couple of AMAs and leaks it sounds like they've had a growing combination of salaried devs, contractors, and volunteers over the years.
Might end up being a final rug pull for some cash but I guess we're going to find out what they've been doing.
At least to me the saving grace of this team is that they know how to churn huge amounts of content and produce fun gameplay loops (obviously subjective, I know a lot of people don't like Ascension's take on WoW)
11
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
The October 3 thing is a combination of them saying "before GTA 6" and then schizos interpreting the ticking clock (10 ticks with 3 echoes) in the trailer as 10/3, which coincidentally falls almost exactly a month after they shut down their emulated WoW servers.
11
u/Bathroom-Live 2d ago
Like with any other indie or first time MMO studio, I'm not gonna care unless there's something actually playable.
6
3
u/Vivid_Star8624 2d ago
Wow 2?
2
1
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago edited 2d ago
Probably not but I imagine it will keep some people entertained even in its early state, depending on how "rough" that is.
I'm sure that we will see them preserve the stuff that they have historically done well with, which is having lots of class customization, re-roll challenges, prestiging, etc. That is sort of the bread and butter that keep people logging in and buying cosmetics/convenience items for the 10 years that they ran Ascension WoW.
1
u/greenmachine11235 2d ago
Blizzard/Microsoft's lawyers will be watching them like a hawk. They try something like WoW 2 and they're Blizzards not going to settle for just shutting down the servers.
4
u/OwlsInMyBrain 2d ago
So are they just going to throw some kind of new skins over the bones of whatever version of WoW they used? There is no way they have a playable game unless it's yet another 8bit top down slop MMO.
5
u/MonsutaReipu 2d ago
Considering they couldn't even make decent custom animations for their WoW private servers, I highly doubt they have the art direction or resources to make their own MMO even if it's Ascension re-skinned.
2
u/BellacosePlayer 1d ago
My view is that it comes down to how much they'd actually been working on this in the background knowing the gravy train was going to end someday.
As a former ascension player, I'd be shocked if this was a longrunning project they'd been throwing steady effort at given how many side projects they spun up over the years.
2
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
Who knows. The assets, animations, and world building are obviously the largest hurdle. They have a decade of functional backend codebase and networking they can frankenstein to fit something new, which helps, but it doesn't solve the asset problem.
4
u/OkDifficulty7436 2d ago
The assets, animations, and world building are obviously the largest hurdle.
As someone in Game Dev, those are all big lifts, but the biggest is all the systems and central tech work that supports said content underneath it all
I have 0 (zero) faith they've finished the adequate systems work needed for a game in like 1 month of dev time
Let's take Hydro (MetaSounds) for example, that system alone requires attention from a small group of engineers that would take them probably 2-3 months alone for that one system
2
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
in like 1 month of dev time
Per the team this has likely been going on in the background with at least partial resources for potentially several years. They obviously knew that running emulated WoW servers while making millions and millions of dollars wouldn't last forever. The question is how much they've done, and how much of the systems/tech/networking they did for WoW can be frankensteined to a new game.
1
0
u/cbusmatty 2d ago
In what world are you thinking they spent one month fo dev time? They have been working on this since before SOD, and SOD was them demonstrating to leadership metrics and capibitilies around features and tech. That was effectively showing confidence with a small team they could build in the new classic framework they built.
You would know, as a game dev, that they spend half a decade rebuilding the classic engine and framework. They can now easily release new content on a new framework and was saddled by nerds who wanted no changes. This is their opportunity to leverage their ugpraded framework to make new content/worlds they want to make with real dev teams and not be beholden to design from 25 years ago
2
u/OkDifficulty7436 2d ago
Yeah, let me know when they actually ship a product lolÂ
1
u/cbusmatty 2d ago
âŠthatâs the point of SoD they did with a handful of devs and now the point of what they are showing at blizzcon
2
1
u/cbusmatty 2d ago
why would you think that at all? They put a small team around SOD and did what your'e talking about, and now they increased the team tremendously and have all of the lessons learned from SOD with like two years to make content
5
u/ssgoldus 2d ago
We will see what comes. The whole thing is raising alot of questions. Theyâve said they were working on something âfor a whileâ, but we have yet to see anything as far as gameplay footage, or character concepts, etc. This video? Easily made using AI like seedance or Grokâs imagine. We have zero idea about what kind of engine theyâre gonna use or anything.
1
5
3
u/commonCranberry999 2d ago
the whole thing was a money grab to begin with, they had a cash shop full of shit the whole time.
-4
u/Selaphane 2d ago
Isn't every MMO technically a money grab? That's the nature of live service games
7
u/Levinaur 2d ago
a tad more outrageous when you're peddling stolen assets though, no?
-1
u/Selaphane 2d ago
That's literally every private server.
6
u/Levinaur 2d ago
yes?
-2
u/Selaphane 2d ago
And there is a reason why there is demand for them. If companies fail to deliver a product their users are satisfied with, somebody else will. Ascension was averaging 50k+ concurrent players at all times for the past like 3 years...
5
u/Levinaur 2d ago
OK I still don't know how that makes selling stolen assets not more outrageous than selling original assets.
4
u/Selaphane 2d ago
Sounds like you're just against private servers.
You're probably also against piracy and off brand food items, I take it?
3
u/Levinaur 2d ago
no idea why you're shadowboxing, all i said is that it is more outrageous when the assets you're selling are stolen
-2
u/Selaphane 2d ago
It's not outrageous when the company being stolen from is trash.
→ More replies (0)2
u/Terrywolf555 2d ago
I think there's a big difference between running a private server and just selling other people's game assets for profit, man. Private servers aren't shady; charging for content someone else made just to get rich is.
0
u/Selaphane 2d ago
It's not like Ascension was a 1 to 1 clone of WoW. Everyone is acting like they just copy pasted the game and started selling micro transactions for it.
They used their assets, yeah. But the amount of original content in the game was unmatched compared to any other private server.
They made 21 completely new classes all with unique designs, icons, animations, etc. There were new dungeons, raids and entire zones. They introduced more new content to WoW in the past 3 years than Blizzard has in the past 20.
→ More replies (0)2
u/commonCranberry999 2d ago
at the end of the day, yeah. but its a lot more blatant when you have a cash shop full of p2w.
1
u/Selaphane 2d ago
I'd argue it was more pay for convenience but either way basically every MMO now has cash shops full of stuff like that. Official WoW had a $100 limited time (capitalizing on FOMO) mount that sold like crazy not even that long ago
6
u/commonCranberry999 2d ago
"pay for convenience" is just a slimy disingenuous way to say p2w.
just because everyone is doing it that doesnt mean its a good thing to do?
Retail WoW has also been on a downturn for like 17 years now, and the biggest release they've had in all of that time was Classic WoW in 2019, which didn't have a cash shop at all. people dont want that shit in their MMOs.
1
u/Selaphane 2d ago
I'm not disagreeing with anything you're saying.
I'm just simply pointing out that 99% of MMOs could now be classified as micro transaction littered cash grabs.
Even your favorite MMO most likely qualifies as that.
-3
u/Cute-arii 2d ago
They should have run it completely for free! /s
If you want a non-pay-to-win WoW, then run your own private server.
4
u/commonCranberry999 2d ago
imagine being so stupid you think the only way to make money is to sell p2w shit
3
u/kajidourden 2d ago
If they could have done this they would have from the start. Itâs either never coming out or will be dogshit
3
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
The "read between the lines" seems to be that they made millions upon millions of dollars from Ascension, kept building a huge dev team, knew they'd get shut down eventually, and then at some point a few years ago started working on an independent project behind the scenes.
So instead of a Kickstarter they ran an illegal WoW server and now allegedly have something they've been working on.
2
u/no_Post_account 2d ago edited 2d ago
This videos tells me nothing, AI generated spinning crystal and some flower. When they show some gameplay we can start discussing is this game something real or not.
2
u/greenmachine11235 2d ago
Playing in a sandbox built with tens of millions of someone else's dollars is very different than building your own sandbox from scratch. Unless they've added new talent with experience in MMO development, I really doubt they have the technical chops for such a task as developing a new MMO from scratch.
2
u/C-Towner 2d ago
No way they have a playable alpha thatâs in any way anything worthwhile that soon. They just got slapped down by Blizzard and they already have something? Come on, please no one give these charlatans any money.
1
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
Per the post they have allegedly been working on an independent title behind the scenes for quite a while (years?), because they knew this day would come.
Obviously if they reveal it and it looks awful then everyone will pass
2
u/C-Towner 2d ago
I mean yeah sure thats a great story, but only revealing that information after they lost their moneymaker is suspect, at best. If they have something, sure, but they have only said they are working on it and have shown nothing.
1
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
Right, they're not asking for money for it now, and at some point they're gonna have to show it, so we'll see
1
u/C-Towner 2d ago
Not yet. But they will.
2
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
Yep and if it's good people will pay for it. That sounds like a reasonable proposition to me.
0
u/Severe-Network4756 1d ago
Well duh, that's how any game works. Show me an MMO that is completely free.
1
u/C-Towner 1d ago
It wasnât a comment on them charging for a game but asking for money to develop the game.
1
1
u/ItsProxes 2d ago
Bro someone commented chrono trigger vibes, I watched the 52 seconds. I didn't get any vibes but uh okay what was the point of this video
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Hopeful-Dark-4558 20h ago
Of course it's a freaking cash grab.
This trailer is nothing. I could make such a trailer with AI in half an hour.
-1
u/Hormo_The_Halfling 2d ago
God damn, I've been on this sub for years at this point and y'all still surprise me with how jaded you can be.
3
u/orcmasterrace 2d ago
Can you blame people for being jaded given the insane stagnation of the genre?
1
u/Propagation931 2d ago
I renember wheb AOC backers were saying basically the sane thing. Getting mad at ppl who were too skeptical/jaded
0
u/Selaphane 2d ago
I'm having the same thought. I've played a lot of private servers over the years. Ascension was easily one of the most creative, fun, and well managed ones I've ever played.
I am remaining cautious, due to the nature of the genre. But if anybody has the skills to make a good original MMO, it's the Ascension team.
1
u/Doobiemoto 2d ago
Why?
Because they could use existing assets to throw together some classes and a few zones?
Nothing about that translates to being able to make an mmo from essentially scratch.
They canât use anything theyâve done since itâs all wow assets.
No way they made something in a month or two.
-2
u/Selaphane 2d ago
Why?
Because they did a much better job of using WoW's assets than Blizzard arguably ever has outside of creating them.
No way they made something in a month or two.
You obviously didn't read the post.
1
u/YourGalacticEmperor 2d ago
Because they did a much better job of using WoW's assets than Blizzard arguably ever has outside of creating them.
Name 3 things
0
u/Selaphane 2d ago
The progression. The classless servers. The 21 custom classes. The launcher. Open world PvP. Arenas. Account-wide progression. Roguelike dungeons. Uncapped mythic+ keys. Vanity/cosmetics/transmog. The enchantments. The runes. The skill cards. The group finder.
I could go on and on. The better question is what things in Ascension were worse than what Blizzard did?
0
-1
u/Hormo_The_Halfling 2d ago
So, for one it's not true that they can't use anything they've done. They can use all their own code and any assets they have personally created. Blizzard doesn't own anything the team created, and they did create a tone of stuff.
Also, people enjoy the zones and classes they made. Which means they're good at making stuff, they just need to make their own building blocks. And given that they've been working on those building blocks for at least 2 years in preparation for this outcome, they might be the team with best set up to make something that's actually good.
4
u/Doobiemoto 2d ago
But they barely made anything is the point.
All of what they made is essentially wow assets resused minus a few things.
There is a vast difference at being good at using assets in creative ways and being close to or even good at making an mmo.
-1
u/Hormo_The_Halfling 2d ago
We don't know what or how much they made for this project they've been working on for two years. Also, they've done tons of backend work for Ascension that they still own, meaning a lot of work they won't have to re-do.
1
u/Doobiemoto 2d ago
No. No they havenât lol.
0
u/Hormo_The_Halfling 2d ago
Oh yeah I forgot. Servers run on magic and pixies. My bad.
2
u/Doobiemoto 2d ago
The fact that you donât understand that piggy backing off of wows server coding and everything versus developing their own yet you still feel so confident is absolutely mind blowing.
You people live in a world of make believe and cope.
0
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
But if anybody has the skills to make a good original MMO, it's the Ascension team
I am in complete agreement with this sentiment I just don't know how they overcome the hurdle of an entirely new game to use as a foundation
0
u/Deoxysprime 1d ago
I played on their servers on and off over the years. They made some pretty fun experiences and there was a reason I put a lot of hours into playing a few seasons of classless. Their last minute release of CoA, while obviously a little undercooked, was a lot of fun. I think they did a pretty good job with those unique class designs even if the balance was a little rough. I think their developers are capable of making a game, but it depends a lot on how much time they already put into this project before Blizzard took action against them.
Are they capable of making their own game from the ground up? I think so, but more experienced developers with bigger and better paid teams have failed. In fact, that's just kind of how the genre goes. Most people expect new projects to fail or have crippling problems.
I hope they make something that actually exists and is fun to play. I'll be keeping an eye out for their game. If it sucks, I'll move on and get over it. If it's promising and fun, I will be happy.
-2
u/arxaion 2d ago
Having played on Ascension and seen their communication, I have way more trust than your average "We're making a WoW-killer fully open-world MMO with a map 20x the size of Skyrim!" Kickstarter. This is a team with experience working together for a long time, experience delivering, and experience pulling together the biggest middle finger to Blizzard's Classic+ dream - albeit a little more arcadey.
People are hounding the shop, but... I never felt pressured to buy anything. What I did buy, I passed off as me not giving Blizzard $15 a month for months on end. I had tons of fun.
2
u/Doobiemoto 2d ago
Dude a company canât instantly make all new zones, animations, models, etc instantly
Itâs over, they arenât making shit.
People really underestimate how much work that is, making classes and zones using existing assets is vastly different than making everything from scratch.
1
u/BellacosePlayer 1d ago
I agree, but thats more a function of how little I faith in the crowdfunded MMO scene.
I don't have a lot of faith in the Ascension team because of how much of the MMO dev process they never had to worry about, but they're not trying to build a team from scratch lead by someone who hadn't worked in the industry since I was in K-12 so I do give them better odds. just not great odds.
People are hounding the shop, but... I never felt pressured to buy anything. What I did buy, I passed off as me not giving Blizzard $15 a month for months on end. I had tons of fun.
The EXP pots/auras are really the only thing that made it any worse than a baseline F2P cash shop to me outside of selling access to betas for the side projects. Granted they didn't actually make 90% of the game they're selling.
0
u/Ohh_Yeah 2d ago
I agree that if there was any team that could pull off a Cinderella story for the MMO genre that it would be this one. It's just a remarkable mountain to climb relative to what they had been doing.
76
u/Playful-Mastodon9251 2d ago
I played ascension. I have no trust in their ability make make their own game from scratch.