| Ashes of Creation | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Everything We Know About Ashes of Creation
Ashes of Creation Plot
Ashes of Creation is set in the high-fantasy world of Verra, a land once thriving with civilization before falling into ruin. The game’s narrative centers on the rebirth of this world, where ancient civilizations, long-buried secrets, and forgotten powers resurface as players return and begin rebuilding society.
Ashes of Creation Gameplay
Ashes of Creation is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game built around large-scale, player-driven systems. Gameplay includes exploration, questing, dungeon content, crafting, trading, PvE encounters, and open-world PvP. Central to its design is the settlement system, where player actions determine how cities grow, what content becomes available, and how regions develop.
Ashes of Creation Release Date
Ashes of Creation was released in Early Access on December 12, 2025. The developers have not yet announced a release date for the full version.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
|||||||
| $49.99 |
Ashes of Creation Review (Early Access)
A Shaky First Step Into Verra
It’s… not looking good. The first steps into Verra were… well, they were more like tripping over a loose floorboard. My initial impressions were already bleak. The game simply wasn’t prepared for the volume of players barreling in on day one. Booting up meant staring down long login queues, the kind that make you contemplate if staring at a wall might be more productive. And even when you finally crawled your way to the front, you hit another wall, being forced to link your Steam account to your Intrepid account—except the Intrepid website was either down for maintenance or repeatedly timing out. Probably due to traffic. Probably unavoidable. Probably something we’ve all seen before.
Every time the website failed, you were thrown back into the login queue. Which means you entered a delightful little loop of misery, repeating itself until the planets aligned and the servers decided you were worthy of entry.
What a way to open an early access review, right? But let me back it up a little before you think I’m here just to stir the pot. As an avid MMORPG enjoyer—someone who has willingly sunk more years than I’d like to admit into virtual worlds, guild drama, and the sacred art of grinding—Ashes of Creation has been on my radar for a long time. Nearly a decade of teases, dev updates, system deep-dives, and promises of "the next evolution of the genre." Naturally, finally getting my hands on this early build felt like stepping into an event I’d been RSVP’d to since my teenage years.
Now, sure, this sounds like your typical MMORPG launch day chaos. We’ve all survived our share of "error 37" and servers collapsing under the weight of hype. It’s easy to brush this off and label the frustrations as overreactions or the usual spurts of review-bombing negativity.
But in my humble opinion? This particular storm could have been avoided. Simple measures could’ve gone a long way here. Pre-loading the client ahead of time. Mandatory Steam-to-Intrepid account linking before early access went live. Any one of these would’ve reduced the strain instead of funneling everyone into the same bottleneck the moment early access opened last Friday. Instead, thousands of players were trying to download, authenticate, link accounts, and log in all at once—through the same systems—on day one. And when those systems buckled, the whole experience came crashing down with them.
Ashes of Creation isn’t just a tiny indie passion project releasing into a whisper. It’s been a juggernaut in the MMO conversation for years. People have been waiting for nearly a decade. Intrepid Studios knew the size of the audience. They’ve nurtured it. They’ve leaned on it. And with the amount of time this game has been cooking, plus the premium price tag players are willing to drop just to experience the earliest build… the first impression shouldn’t feel like a time machine back to the launch day disasters of the early 2010s.
And in a landscape where MMORPGs are evolving faster than ever—with games like Where Winds Meet and Sword of Justice pulling off surprisingly smooth launches just last month—Ashes of Creation, especially with how it’s introducing itself to the public right now, already feels like it’s getting left behind by time.
I couldn’t even play on launch day myself. I had to wait a few days until the login issues smoothed out, servers stabilized, and the whole account-linking purgatory finally calmed down. And even when I was finally able to start, I still ended up waiting several more hours just to connect to a server—despite realm lists showing relatively low player counts at the time. So if you’re wondering why you’re only seeing this review now… well, let’s just say I spent launch week twiddling my thumbs to log in myself.
Not the grand entrance anyone hoped for. But hey, let’s keep digging. The surface is rough, but there’s a whole world beneath it, and I’ve only just stepped in.
A World That Moves When You Do
At its core, Ashes of Creation sells a powerful fantasy and not the fireball-and-dragons kind you’ve heard a hundred times before. This is a world that doesn’t just exist for you; it reacts to you. Verra isn’t a static backdrop waiting for players to pass through; it’s something closer to a living organism, reshaped by population, conflict, ambition, and neglect. Cities rise because players will them into existence. They fall because players fail to protect them. And everything in between such as trade routes and political power are meant to shift depending on who shows up and what they decide to do.
The narrative pitch isn’t delivered through a single, rigid main storyline where you’re crowned the chosen hero five minutes in. Instead, Ashes of Creation frames its "story" as something communal and emergent. Civilization itself is the plot. You’re stepping into a world that was once vibrant, collapsed into ruin, and is now being rebuilt in real time by the people inhabiting it. Ancient secrets lie buried under deserts and forgotten ruins, sure, but the real hook is that uncovering them isn’t just about lore drops or loot tables. It’s about who gets there first, who controls the surrounding territory, and whether the infrastructure exists to support that discovery at all.
That idea bleeds directly into how the game plays. Ashes of Creation isn’t interested in funneling everyone down the same path. Instead, it pushes you to choose how you want to exist in this world. You can be on the front lines, leading armies into massive PvP conflicts and sieges that quite literally decide the fate of regions. You can live in the margins, focusing on gathering, crafting, and manipulating the economy—controlling resource routes, building trade empires, or sabotaging rival caravans when opportunity strikes. Or you can disappear into the wilds, chasing exploration, dungeons, and forgotten spaces that only reveal themselves once certain conditions in the world have been met.
What ties all of this together is the settlement system—the backbone of Ashes of Creation’s design. These player-driven cities don’t just act as glorified hubs. As settlements grow, they unlock new quests, systems, political structures, and even visual transformations. Mayors are elected. Alliances are forged. Wars are declared. And when things go wrong—when a settlement is sieged, neglected, or outright destroyed—the world doesn’t politely reset. It adapts. Power vacuums form. New opportunities emerge for someone else to step in and reshape the map.
Combat and progression lean into that same philosophy of choice and consequence. With eight primary archetypes that can be combined to create wildly different playstyles, Ashes of Creation wants your character to feel like a reflection of intent rather than a preset role. Whether you’re leaning into stealth, battlefield control, summoning, or pure survivability, your build feeds back into the broader ecosystem—especially once hundreds of players collide in large-scale warfare. These aren’t isolated battlegrounds or neatly contained encounters. They’re clashes that ripple outward, affecting trade, politics, and territorial control long after the fighting stops.
And that’s really the promise Ashes of Creation keeps circling back to: no two realms should ever feel the same. Your story isn’t written in a quest log. It’s written in who you align with, what you protect, what you destroy, and what you leave behind. Whether you end up as a city builder, a warlord, a profiteer, or a ghost haunting the edges of civilization, the game wants your presence to matter.
On paper, it’s an ambitious, intoxicating vision. But does it actually deliver? Let’s talk about it.
Lost Without a Compass
I’ll admit it upfront, I might be a little biased here, simply because of the hurdles I had to clear before I could even log into Ashes of Creation. But even setting that frustration aside, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this consistently confused in an MMORPG.
And no, this isn’t coming from someone new to MMOs. I’ve cut my teeth on the old stuff— Ragnarok Online, Black Desert, you name it. I don’t need my hand held. I don’t need glowing arrows telling me where to go every five seconds. I’m perfectly fine being dropped into a world and told to, "Figure it out."
But Ashes of Creation doesn’t feel like it’s testing player intuition. Instead, it feels like it’s withholding information. Yes, there is a new player guide, and the game does make an effort to point you in the right direction, offering brief descriptions and directional nudges. But it rarely goes beyond that. Systems are introduced without context, mechanics are mentioned without explanation, and you’re often left unsure whether you’re missing something important or if the system simply isn’t fully implemented yet.
It doesn’t help that even the most basic controls feel unintuitive. Something as simple as directional movement can be confusing at first, since your character doesn’t automatically follow the camera’s facing direction—you have to right-click each time you want to adjust where you’re moving. It’s a small thing on paper, but when you’re already trying to parse unfamiliar systems and unclear objectives, that extra layer of friction only adds to the sense that you’re fighting the interface instead of learning the game.
And that uncertainty matters. Especially in an MMO this systems-heavy. Yes, I understand that this is early access. But there’s a difference between "unfinished" and "unclear," and Ashes of Creation often lands squarely in the latter.
When a game’s entire identity hinges on player-driven systems like economics, settlements, politics, you need players to understand how to meaningfully engage with them, even in an early build. I wasn’t even making any real progress until I stopped and talked to another player, who explained what I should have been doing in the first place. Right now, too much of that learning curve feels like guesswork.
Combat Without a Pulse
Then there’s the combat. And… yeah. I’m sorry. It’s bland. Not broken. Not offensively bad. Just flat. And in a way, that makes it worse than failure. Combat in Ashes of Creation lacks impact, feedback, and identity; three things you absolutely need in a genre where you’re expected to fight thousands of enemies over hundreds of hours.
There’s no real sense of weight behind your actions. Animations don’t sell power particularly well, enemy reactions are muted, and encounters rarely feel tense or dynamic. For a game that promises massive warfare, meaningful PvP, and high-stakes risk-versus-reward systems, the moment-to-moment fighting feels surprisingly safe and unremarkable.
That’s not to say there isn’t potential here. The archetype system hints at flexibility and depth down the line, and I can see how large-scale encounters might eventually elevate the experience. But in its current state, combat feels like a placeholder—functional, serviceable, and utterly unexciting.
And in an MMO, that’s a dangerous thing to be.
Rough Performance, Steady Ground
Performance is another sore spot, and honestly, one that’s harder to excuse. Ashes of Creation doesn’t exactly look like a cutting-edge title. Visually, it often feels like a game from a decade ago, or at least one that’s still straddling generations. So when performance issues like sluggish moments, frame drops, and general jank crop up as frequently as they do, it raises some uncomfortable questions.
That said—and credit where it’s due—once I was actually connected and in-game, things were surprisingly stable in one important way: I didn’t disconnect.The servers themselves held up during my playtime. No sudden kicks. No crashes booting me back to desktop. No emergency relogs mid-session.
It’s not smooth. But it is steady. And even though it’s been a decade, this is still the game’s Alpha version so I guess that counts for something.
Glimpses of Something Better
I don’t want this review to come across as purely cynical. Because despite all of the above, I can’t deny that there’s something special brewing here.
Ashes of Creation has ambition pouring out of every system it tries to implement. The idea of a world that genuinely reacts to player behavior, where settlements grow or collapse based on activity, where politics and warfare shape the available content—that’s compelling. That’s the kind of promise MMO fans have been chasing for years.
You can see the scaffolding. You can see the vision. And that’s what makes the current state so frustrating. Because the potential is obvious—but unrealized. The ideas are bold, but the execution hasn’t caught up yet. Right now, Ashes of Creation feels like a foundation waiting for the building to arrive.
The Cost of Early Access
So the big question: Is Ashes of Creation worth $49.99 in early access? For me, no. Not right now.
That price tag is a tough sell, especially when you remember that the game is expected to transition into a subscription-based model once it fully releases. Traditionally, subscriptions are meant to replace aggressive monetization—to fund ongoing development without nickel-and-diming players. But as it currently stands, it looks like Ashes of Creation may end up asking players to accept both a subscription and additional monetization down the line.
And that’s a hard pill to swallow when what you’re paying for today is an alpha build with rough onboarding, uninspired combat, and uneven performance. Don’t get me wrong—the game itself has potential. As an MMO concept, what Ashes of Creation is promising could genuinely shake up the genre if it all comes together. A living world shaped by its players is a powerful idea.
But right now? $49.99 for access to that idea and not the finished experience just doesn’t feel worth it. Not yet at least.
Game8 Reviews
You may also like...
 |
Nioh 3 Review [Alpha Demo] Action, RPG |
 |
Of Ash and Steel Review Action, RPG, Survival |
 |
Where Winds Meet Review Action, Adventure, RPG |
 |
Sword of Justice Review MMORPG, Adventure, Open-World |
 |
Ashes of Creation Launch Marred by 8-Hour Website Crash |
Ashes of Creation Product Information
 |
|
| Title | ASHES OF CREATION |
|---|---|
| Release Date | Early Access December 11, 2025 Full Release TBD |
| Developer | Intrepid Studios, Inc |
| Publisher | Intrepid Studios, Inc |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Adventure, MMORPG |
| Number of Players | 1-99 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Ashes of Creation Official Website |
