In one moment, I see a field of empty grass; the next, I’m looking at a thriving elven village with blocks of cozy shops sprawling over a sea of cobblestones. Rome may not have been built in a day, but this joint went up in a fraction of a second.

“ The game's various invisible “nodes” can transform into entire cities based on heavy player activity in the area.

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Ashes of Creation , warns me this kind of growth should normally take days. Through developer magic, he and lead designer Jeffrey Bard are showing me the way the game's various invisible “nodes” can transform into entire cities based on heavy player activity in the area, but we've skipped over previous stages that include tents and encampments to see this place in advanced form.Developer Intrepid Studios intends that all cities save the starting ones will grow this way, with players contributing to their growth with harvesting, monster slaughter, and even economic trade with caravans. Players will even be able to have some say in which buildings appear, and the city's architecture would be decided based on which race of players in the area (such as humans or elves) have contributed the most. (Expect to see some editorials on that one.) Right now, it's looking like the best attempt at a dynamic world in traditional fantasy MMORPG since the demise of EverQuest Next ( RIP ).

Click on the video above for our brand-new gameplay. Videos below are from previous Ashes of Creation coverage.

“ It’s huge already – about the size of Skyrim, Sharif says – and once completed, what I'm seeing will amount to only around 1/30 of the total land area.

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“ It's clearly a pre-alpha, though a pretty one.

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“ We wouldn't have even been able to enter the dungeon had the node above not advanced into a village.

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“ Each server essentially exists as its own alternate reality.

back in May , but back then I’d been watching him and colleagues on a livestream over which I had little control. Now, though, I'm in the world myself and it's kind of exciting to see in action, rough though the edges remain. For a little more than half a year from a small team, this is an impressive amount of work.Over the course of two hours, Sharif and lead designer Jeffrey Bard lead me through misty ruins and through deep forests that recall the shadowed paths of Skyrim’s Falkreath. Beyond that, we jog over soggy floodplains and into semiarid landscapes, and at last into network of yawning caverns called the Underrealm that snakes under the entirety of the world above. It’s huge already – about the size of Skyrim, Sharif says – and once completed, what I'm seeing will amount to only around 1/30 of the total land area."We’re much farther along than many other Kickstarter-funded projects at this phase," he says.It’s true, but as we run along it’s increasingly clear that I’m basically seeing a primed canvas. It's clearly a pre-alpha, though a pretty one. No map or minimap yet exists, which means we often lose each other when we wander out of view. Elsewhere, enemies still lack variety and the gathering system – which will fuel most of the EVE Online-inspired economy – isn’t even in the game yet.Combat, though, keeps me interested. I'm playing as a human mage, and I find it an active business of nearly nonexistent cast times and jazzy animations that see me lobbing ball lightning on angry little mushrooms. Much as with Guild Wars 2's Elementalist, I can call up small earthquakes, and, in the style of World of Warcraft's "Blink" spell, I can evade danger by teleporting a few yards ahead.It's the highlight of my visit. It'd be wrong to call the dungeon mechanically complex: all we really did was smack around some crooks. But it's the implementation that makes me a little excited.We wouldn't have even been able to enter the dungeon had the node above not advanced into a village; had the node still just been a collection of tents, we’d have found a big rock blocking the path. The design grants some incentive to advance the nodes, and in such a way that enhances the interactivity and dynamic nature of the world itself. It's this feature that I'm eager to see in its full form, even above the ability to briefly terrorize towns as a monster Much of the world I saw will remain static as well. Yet the ways cities grow (and die) in different spots owing to player activity seems like it parallels the rise and fall of cities in a real-world civilization. For that matter, as different towns will be stronger from server to server, each server essentially exists as its own alternate reality.It's currently hard to tell how the well Ashes of Creation will fare with fairly generic quests needed to support such dynamic cities if it will pull off the EVE-in-fantasy model where others have failed. Unlike that village, Intrepid's MMORPG won't be finished in an instant. We clearly still have months if not years to wait. But once it goes up, what I'm seeing here is making me think we may find ourselves in love with the MMORPG again after years of comparative stagnation. A phoenix from the ashes, you might say. I'm willing to wait.

Leif Johnson is a contributing editor for IGN who has written about games from a remote ranch in Texas for years. That finally ends this week, and after seven years of content, this may be his last piece for IGN. You can see what he's up to next on Twitter at @leifjohnson