What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access? “Everyone at Intrepid Studios is focused on building games that help bring people together. Part of what makes us who we are is the ability to connect with others, and we adhere to this design principle throughout our development process. Since the beginning, we’ve held to the philosophy of making games with no pay-to-win or cash grab elements – we respect our players and believe that these tactics aren’t necessary if we simply build games that players want to play. That philosophy, combined with a commitment to communication with our community, reflects the most important values that we as developers can uphold. With development at full speed, it’s crucial and valuable feedback from our community that makes Early Access a great platform for us. We look forward to creating Ashes of Creation Apocalypse together!” Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access? “The ability to collaborate with our community and shape our highly-ambitious mechanics and features for Ashes of Creation Apocalypse is what makes Early Access the most appealing for us. We want to ensure everyone has the best experience possible, and consequently, we’ve decided to keep our schedule fairly flexible so that the development team and community can adhere to this.” How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version? “The Early Access version introduces a solid foundation for Ashes of Creation Apocalypse. With the aid of our community, we plan to support a number of different game modes, including battle royale-style gameplay, castle sieges, and gigantic monster horde battles! All of which will help shape the world of Verra.” What is the current state of the Early Access version? “With all of the valuable feedback we were able to gather in our previous tests for Ashes of Creation Apocalypse, we’ve committed significant development time to ensure that we’ve improved our combat & weapon balance, user interface & player experience, and game performance. Our core mechanics and features for the Battle Royale gameplay mode are present, but now we want your help in finalizing the polishing touches as we move onto our other gameplay modes - Castle Siege and Horde Mode. Of course, while much of the game is present and working, we hope you understand that Ashes of Creation Apocalypse is still in active development, so some of our features are subject to change, and you may witness the odd bug here or there.” Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access? “Ashes of Creation Apocalypse will be free-to-play with no pay-to-win purchases. While we add more game modes, features, and systems to the experience of Ashes of Creation Apocalypse, this will not alter the price for players who join us after the Early Access period. Also, as a reminder, any rewards you earn in Ashes of Creation Apocalypse will carry over to the Ashes of Creation MMORPG as well!” How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process? “Every piece of feedback you provide and bug you report during our Ashes of Creation Apocalypse Early Access phase helps us polish the game. Whether it’s nailing down third-person action combat for integration into the hybrid combat system, experimenting with a broad range of ability interactions, or solidifying our back-end services like patching and authentication, these tests provide us data to aid us in making the right decisions. As we work to master the three core fundamentals - character, control, and camera - everything we learn from player interactions in Ashes of Creation Apocalypse becomes part of our iterative process, and allows us to refine and polish the game. In addition, Apocalypse gives us the opportunity to test and validate key systems in the form of new game modes (like Castle Siege and Horde Mode), so we can fine-tune our systems with data collected both internally from our QA team and externally from our community. When you jump in and play Apocalypse with us, you also help us with essential large-scale combat testing that allows us to optimize client and server performance - so we can build towards the huge battles and sieges you can expect to see in the future.”