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cathead
Jan 21, 2004


Slightly-Larger-Than-Last-Time World Edition™


What the hell is this poo poo?

Crowfall is an upcoming MMORPG by Artcraft, led by J. Todd Coleman and Gordon Walton, who have worked on games like Shadowbane, UO, and SWG. In January 2015 it had a successful kickstarter that raised $1.7 million, and since then has secured additional funding to bring the budget up to $6.3 million.

Crowfall is billed as a “Throne War Simulator”, an exclusively PvP experience built on the concept of “persistent characters, temporary worlds”. The game will have multiple “campaign worlds” to choose from that will last a finite amount of time, with different rulesets to cater to different levels of risk and reward in PvP (such as full/partial looting, etc.). The world maps will be procedurally generated and will use some basic historical simulation to populate ruins and other points of interest. Your character progress is independent of these worlds. The campaign worlds will last anywhere from a couple weeks to months, and allow different ratios of item/resource import/export based upon their ruleset. Thus you can aim to “win” campaign worlds through various victory conditions (conquest, survival, etc.), and then move on to a fresh one with a percentage of your spoils and start all over.

The one persistent world is the Eternal Kingdoms, where each player will have their own instance to do with as they please, such as building castles, providing places to gather or trade, or storing trophies and artifacts from their conquests.

The game will also have an Eve-like skill training system where you select skills to train and they train even if you are offline. The way the character system works is a bit different from most other MMOs. You have your immortal Crow which represents you, the player, and contains all the skills you've trained or are training. Your Crow then inhabits a Vessel, which becomes the character you're playing, which has a specific archetype and determines what base abilities you have. The skills you've trained will further affect your effectiveness with that archetype as well as what secondary skills you have. If you want to think of it in Eve terms, your Crow is your "pilot" and the Vessel is your "ship". See the character advancement and crows/vessels FAQs for more info.

The game will be buy-to-play, with an optional VIP sub. Standard accounts will allow you to train one general skill and one archetype skill at any given time. The VIP sub will allow you to train one general skill and three archetype skills at once (though they must be from different archetype trees, so no double/triple-dipping). Thus far that's the only difference between standard and VIP.

Latest ETA for release seems to be sometime in mid-late 2017. They are still managing to hit their goals and deadlines fairly on time, so there's a chance they might actually reasonably hit that ETA. Still a lot that needs to be done though and we're not anywhere near beta yet, so who knows.


What’s been going on lately?

Against all odds, Artcraft has somehow made it to the point where Crowfall is starting to feel like an actual game. Current playtests seem to mostly run over the weekends for about 3 days, and feature a basic gameplay loop of gathering resources, crafting custom armor and items, and killing other people for the stuff they have. The map is bigger now and each of the testing servers are getting unique map layouts so they can further test procedural generation. Next on the list is to get an Eternal Kingdom prototype working as well as the embargo (import/export) rules to transfer stuff between the campaign worlds and EK. As that all comes online we'll start getting a lot closer to what Crowfall will end up being when it's complete.


Should I spend money on this game?

Well it's an actual playable game now so it's unlikely it will just disappear, but we still don't know how all these things will come together in the end so unless you're fine with tossing your money in the toilet you'll probably want to wait for release or at least closer to it to see how things shape up as they move toward the full game.


GOONS?!?!?!?!?

Yeah we're goonin. Nothing concrete yet since the game is still fairly small and not up all the time, but get on the :siren:Discord:siren: if you're in the tests.

Here's some preliminary wacky goon antics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_L7DSyv3iA

Capntastic posted:

Yeah in reviewing it it was more fun when he was complaining that we outnumbered him and were unfair literally minutes after him and his pal were picking off solo miners.

We still made ourselves the enemy of the server that night.


Using a looted campfire to celebrate an amazing victory against all odds


Friendship is Overpowered


Special Three Axe Technique Proves Unstoppable




Links, resources, spreadsheets, other nerd poo poo:

Testing Schedule
Crafting combinations spreadsheet

cathead fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Dec 16, 2016

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cybertier
May 2, 2013
This really sounds super interesting.

Since you joined the combat-test can you talk about the in-vessel gameplay? I.e. Is it WoW-esque with just range-limited Abilities or do you have to aim anything?

Stormgale
Feb 27, 2010

Does this mean some vessels will be flat out better?

Edit: answer yes

Stormgale fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Dec 30, 2015

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

cybertier posted:

This really sounds super interesting.

Since you joined the combat-test can you talk about the in-vessel gameplay? I.e. Is it WoW-esque with just range-limited Abilities or do you have to aim anything?

To be completely honest about it, it felt like a way more janky version of Tera. Which makes sense as that's one of the combat systems they were inspired by. Most range stuff was aimed or soft-locked, melee abilities had cone/aoe ranges, and most abilities had varying levels of animation locks so you had to commit when you attacked. As I mentioned in the OP though it ran kind of lovely (what with being a pre-alpha and all) so it was hard to get a sense of how fluid things will be in the end. The concepts seem interesting and workable though.

They have done a couple of articles on archetype skills, a lot of it is somewhat temporary stuff so they could try out different tech to implement in the final archetype makeups later on.

http://crowfall.com/en/news/first-look-knight-powers-and-ui/
http://crowfall.com/en/news/first-look-confessor-powers/
http://crowfall.com/en/news/first-look-legionnaire-powers/
http://crowfall.com/en/news/first-look-champion-powers-and-ui/

You can see a lot of similar design concepts though, especially as far as some skills combo together or chain into different skills contextually.

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Stormgale posted:

Does this mean some vessels will be flat out better?

Sounds like this might be the case. Vessels provide your "base attributes", and there's an answer in the FAQ that talks about how vessels follow item quality level rules, and so better quality vessels will have better attributes and skill caps. They'll either be crafted (and thus based on crafting skill level) or found in the world/given as campaign rewards (thus based on the risk/reward level of the campaign world). There's some bits in the FAQ that talk about this. They are tradable though, so they can be taken in/out of worlds (subject to import/export rules), sold, or traded among friends and guildmembers.

I have a feeling this will be going through a LOT of tuning and iteration over time though since there's a lot of things there you have to be careful with or they could get out of hand, balance wise.

malhavok
Jan 18, 2013
It's basically EVE ships isn't it?

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

malhavok posted:

It's basically EVE ships isn't it?

Yeah I mentioned that in the OP. You can collect a bunch of different archetype vessels and swap between them as needed, you'll just be depending on what skills you have trained on your account.

The major difference from Eve is the idea that you don't just straight up lose it if you die no matter what, the way vessels and death are treated can change significantly depending on what campaign world ruleset you choose and it's associated risk/reward. It could be anything from "cannot be stolen from you, there are ways to get it returned to you if you die" all the way to "you died, you have to have to either get back to your body or have an ally pick it up within a certain amount of time or it can be permanently taken from you by the enemy and you'll have to get a new one", and any number of variations in between. That's why it fits pretty well into their campaign worlds idea, since that sort of flexibility and choice for the player was something they wanted from the start.

mightygerm
Jun 29, 2002



Yeah to me, they are just abstracting out the idea of the pilot/ship disconnect in games like eve to a fantasy world.
It allows you a lot of flexibility, especially in making classes unique and very specialized. You'd have no issues making a pure support class since a player wouldn't be "stuck" in it.

Byolante
Mar 23, 2008

by Cyrano4747
for what is meant to be a pvp focused game the idea of tying skill unlocks to a real world timer is hilariously concerning. That sounds suspiciously like consigning anyone who didn't arrive and start playing after the final server wipe to a perpetual state of second class citizenry.

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Byolante posted:

for what is meant to be a pvp focused game the idea of tying skill unlocks to a real world timer is hilariously concerning. That sounds suspiciously like consigning anyone who didn't arrive and start playing after the final server wipe to a perpetual state of second class citizenry.

Yeah, I totally agree, and thankfully they've mentioned this a couple times. If there's one thing I really can't fault them for it's that they're pretty thorough about thinking through their ideas and identifying potential issues with it, even if they might not have a complete solution right away.

They have a couple things in mind for this (it's actually mentioned in one of the FAQ questions). First is that skill gains are on a diminishing curve. It's much faster to get the first 20% than the last 2%. Along those lines it's also worth noting that (at least as far as I can tell right now) these skills aren't generally like Eve skills where it's "finish skill to do thing". Rather it's "train skill to do thing, put time into it to get good at it", with prereqs for the next skill in the tree not necessarily requiring the previous skill to be maxed.

Secondly, there are going to be caps on skills based on the vessel you're using and any runestones applied to it. The example they gave is your Crow might have 1handed Swords trained to 200. However, you enter a Knight vessel that has a cap of 100, so your skill will actually be capped at that level. However, you could add a "Blademaster" runestone that increases the cap by 25, and then you'd have 125 skill. Or maybe you find or craft a Knight vessel with higher quality and have a higher cap that way. Obviously if your skill was less than the cap (like 75 or whatever) then it would just be there until you trained it up.

Hopefully that makes sense? It seems like a pretty flexible system, but also could lead to balance hell, so I'm interested to see if they simplify or pare it down at all during development.

edit: Oh yeah, they also mentioned they have a couple ideas in mind for "catch up" mechanics for newer players down the road that they'll explore at some point. They want to strike a balance between early players having a slight advantage, but not something that's insurmountable for new players.

cathead fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Dec 30, 2015

malhavok
Jan 18, 2013

Byolante posted:

for what is meant to be a pvp focused game the idea of tying skill unlocks to a real world timer is hilariously concerning. That sounds suspiciously like consigning anyone who didn't arrive and start playing after the final server wipe to a perpetual state of second class citizenry.

That would only be true if skills had no caps. Someone who started earlier is going to have more options, but on a per character basis it shouldn't be much trouble to catch up.

Impotence
Nov 8, 2010
Lipstick Apathy
i flushed money down the toilet for this garbage where is my completed game it's been like a year

Alexander DeLarge
Dec 20, 2013
I did a $20 layaway for the $175 pack. Cool thing is, if I like it in 17 months, I pay the rest, if not, the $20 I paid today goes back into my account and I can use it as a $20 voucher towards a basic package

Lastgirl
Sep 7, 1997


Good Morning!
Sunday Morning!
Oh gee this thread is back~

There's a reason why Eonwe took the old one into the SA public restroom stall and shot it friend

but glad to be here again :peanut:

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Lastgirl posted:

Oh gee this thread is back~

There's a reason why Eonwe took the old one into the SA public restroom stall and shot it friend

but glad to be here again :peanut:

Look they had the big reveal and I just HAD to get my effortpost out. It's a horrible addiction.

:justpost: that's my life every day :smith:

Anyway If this thread dies too then so be it. But it seemed better to have a place where people could dump some posts if they felt like talking about it once in awhile than to not have anything at all. Especially since ACE is actually sticking remotely to the testing schedules and we're slowly getting to the point that more and more people can get together and play.

Lastgirl
Sep 7, 1997


Good Morning!
Sunday Morning!
I'm glad you did, I wasn't trying to sound overly smarmy :unsmith:


I haven't even tried the game out even though I'm in the tester group. I wish they would take cues from Smite instead of too much on Tera tbh, Tera felt so weighty in a bad way

e: checking out the big reveal~ thanks for the update

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Lastgirl posted:

I'm glad you did, I wasn't trying to sound overly smarmy :unsmith:


I haven't even tried the game out even though I'm in the tester group. I wish they would take cues from Smite instead of too much on Tera tbh, Tera felt so weighty in a bad way

e: checking out the big reveal~ thanks for the update

You didn't miss that much, it was fun to mess around with for a bit but it ran like poo poo. I'm interested to see how their solutions work out in the next test.

Also it seems like they're moving away somewhat from some of the Tera ideas, talking about reducing animation locks and speeding up some moves, and adding velocity to some of the longer animations so that you continue moving rather than just stop and are rooted while you do the ability.

Blazing Zero
Sep 7, 2012

*sigh* sure. it's a weed joke
i lit :10bux: :10bux: :10bux: on fire for this game, so im here to defend my purchase~

- white knight blazing 'apologist' zero

Blazing Zero
Sep 7, 2012

*sigh* sure. it's a weed joke
cathead, i will play this game with you and with anyone when it is available to play. i cant wait to see what's in store for us all

Robo Reagan
Feb 12, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
question can i pay money and play a completed project right now

mightygerm
Jun 29, 2002



The next playtest is on January 6th.

Blazing Zero
Sep 7, 2012

*sigh* sure. it's a weed joke

Robo Reagan posted:

question can i pay money and play a completed project right now

there's not an ongoing early access beta or anything iirc. if you drop hundreds of dollars you can get into bad tech demo alphas though :homebrew:

Robo Reagan
Feb 12, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
okay well looking forward to the inevitable buggy alpha followed by a buggy release in 2025 before the game dies a silent F2P death

Blazing Zero
Sep 7, 2012

*sigh* sure. it's a weed joke

Robo Reagan posted:

okay well looking forward to the inevitable buggy alpha followed by a buggy release in 2025 before the game dies a silent F2P death

nice meltdown

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Robo Reagan posted:

okay well looking forward to the inevitable buggy alpha followed by a buggy release in 2025 before the game dies a silent F2P death

Um excuse me it's going to be B2P. :c00lbutt:

Anyway like I said in the OP there's no point in investing in it right now unless you like flinging money into the wind. It's going to be a while longer before we see just how many of these ideas they have they can actually get working cleanly, and more importantly how much of it is actually fun in practice.

ravaeyn
Mar 10, 2004

Looking forward to playing this game for sure. IF they match their lofty development goals. I am cautiously optimistic.

Impotence
Nov 8, 2010
Lipstick Apathy

Robo Reagan posted:

okay well looking forward to the inevitable buggy alpha followed by a buggy release in 2025 before the game dies a silent F2P death

Lastgirl
Sep 7, 1997


Good Morning!
Sunday Morning!

cathead posted:

You didn't miss that much, it was fun to mess around with for a bit but it ran like poo poo. I'm interested to see how their solutions work out in the next test.

Also it seems like they're moving away somewhat from some of the Tera ideas, talking about reducing animation locks and speeding up some moves, and adding velocity to some of the longer animations so that you continue moving rather than just stop and are rooted while you do the ability.

Thats good because Tera is not really skillful enough imo. Skillshots and juking is what makes things more visceral and adrenaline-induced . Not watching your character get punished while being rooted in animation. There's a balance to that though

Like it works amazing in monster hunter 4 ultimate because it factors in timing and positioning, and its perfect (perfect in that when you're locked in a potion drinking animation and the monster lunges at you, you rage and almost snap your DS in half :3:). TERA is garbage at that

Kimsemus
Dec 4, 2013

by Reene
Toilet Rascal
I will watch this game, because it has some concepts I like, but I'm having a hard time envisioning how the final product will work well.

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Lastgirl posted:

Thats good because Tera is not really skillful enough imo. Skillshots and juking is what makes things more visceral and adrenaline-induced . Not watching your character get punished while being rooted in animation. There's a balance to that though

Like it works amazing in monster hunter 4 ultimate because it factors in timing and positioning, and its perfect (perfect in that when you're locked in a potion drinking animation and the monster lunges at you, you rage and almost snap your DS in half :3:). TERA is garbage at that

Tera kind of gets a pass in most people's books because it actually attempted to do something different when MMOs were all basically just tab-target hotkey style. It's definitely not a perfect system.

Kimsemus posted:

I will watch this game, because it has some concepts I like, but I'm having a hard time envisioning how the final product will work well.

I said this in the old thread but I think some of the eventual success of the game depends on how the players actually consume the system design and content they're providing. Like ok, we've got separate campaigns with different rulesets, but what if everyone flocks to one type and not another? Thankfully they seem prepared to monitor those kinds of trends and iterate and adjust accordingly, but you only get so many chances to make something really work before people just give up. This is why I think it's imperative that they get the combat right and feeling good, because people will stick around for a lot longer despite other design issues if they feel the day-to-day gameplay is fun to do.

Kimsemus
Dec 4, 2013

by Reene
Toilet Rascal

cathead posted:

Tera kind of gets a pass in most people's books because it actually attempted to do something different when MMOs were all basically just tab-target hotkey style. It's definitely not a perfect system.


I said this in the old thread but I think some of the eventual success of the game depends on how the players actually consume the system design and content they're providing. Like ok, we've got separate campaigns with different rulesets, but what if everyone flocks to one type and not another? Thankfully they seem prepared to monitor those kinds of trends and iterate and adjust accordingly, but you only get so many chances to make something really work before people just give up. This is why I think it's imperative that they get the combat right and feeling good, because people will stick around for a lot longer despite other design issues if they feel the day-to-day gameplay is fun to do.

This is 100% true, and the danger with adaptive games like this, and really any MMO launch, is you have ONE chance to have a strong release, typically games that bomb the release, even if they recover later, never ever do as well as they could. It's important they get everything right now. But I'm all for an EVE style training queue, character persistence, and campaigns to keep things fresh and exciting. How large can the player battles be, it won't be heavily instanced, right?

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Kimsemus posted:

This is 100% true, and the danger with adaptive games like this, and really any MMO launch, is you have ONE chance to have a strong release, typically games that bomb the release, even if they recover later, never ever do as well as they could. It's important they get everything right now. But I'm all for an EVE style training queue, character persistence, and campaigns to keep things fresh and exciting. How large can the player battles be, it won't be heavily instanced, right?

I don't think they were capping it. It was basically "whoever's on this particular campaign server at the time and shows up" kind of idea. Obviously there are some technical considerations there, and that's supposed to be the focus of their next testing phase after combat.

Kimsemus
Dec 4, 2013

by Reene
Toilet Rascal

cathead posted:

I don't think they were capping it. It was basically "whoever's on this particular campaign server at the time and shows up" kind of idea. Obviously there are some technical considerations there, and that's supposed to be the focus of their next testing phase after combat.

So can you explain how the maps work then? Is it one huge battlefield where you build stuff and fight or is it little instances or what's going on?

mightygerm
Jun 29, 2002



Kimsemus posted:

So can you explain how the maps work then? Is it one huge battlefield where you build stuff and fight or is it little instances or what's going on?

From the wiki: "These Campaigns aren’t just “instances”, though -- they are fully populated, continent-sized, seamless zone MMO servers. The only thing they have in common with an “instance” is that they are time-limited."

cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Kimsemus posted:

So can you explain how the maps work then? Is it one huge battlefield where you build stuff and fight or is it little instances or what's going on?

Based on what they've said, each campaign world will be a self-contained, procedurally generated, seamless world. So basically a big map that people will stake out territory on and fight over whatever victory condition that particular campaign has.

Byolante
Mar 23, 2008

by Cyrano4747
Its a real shame because there are a lot of good ideas but they arte being shackled to a UO revival mmo. Open PVP has always failed and always will fail and missing out on iterative content servers sucks because they are going to get lumped in with full pvp idiocy.

Kylra
Dec 1, 2006

Not a cute boy, just a boring girl.
I dunno. A class-based sharded game universe with a variety of rulesets (including a variety of loot settings) and eve-style training as opposed to macro grinding doesn't sound at all like a UO revival mmo to me. Sounds more Dark Age of Camelot if anything.

Still looking forward to seeing where this goes. Did they ever unlock their forums?

Stormgale
Feb 27, 2010

I think the best/worst thing about thte sharding is how it will allow players/groups of players to go to another more fun world if poo poo is bad but conversely the same is true (as a downside if people always leave).

It will be managing that (And ensuring a good valid PVP playpool) that will sink or swim this IMO.

Robo Reagan
Feb 12, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Blazing Zero posted:

nice meltdown

im not sure you know what a meltdown is

good on you for being oddly passive aggressive about another vapoware mmo though

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cathead
Jan 21, 2004

Stormgale posted:

I think the best/worst thing about thte sharding is how it will allow players/groups of players to go to another more fun world if poo poo is bad but conversely the same is true (as a downside if people always leave).

It will be managing that (And ensuring a good valid PVP playpool) that will sink or swim this IMO.

Yeah that was one of the potential issues they identified early on. They had some ideas that ranged from pretty hardline stuff like "if you join a campaign your character is locked to it until the end" to more granular stuff like "you can leave early but you'll forfeit your rewards and have to pay a penalty". I imagine we might see some different approaches now that they've settled on the vessel system though.

I think no matter what it's going to be a long road to get to the "full design" of the game, with multiple campaigns in different rulesets running concurrently. I know their initial focus was starting with "The Dregs" where it's FFA full loot, ostensibly because that's the easiest way to test combat and looting interactions for the more complex rulesets later on. It's also probably the easiest way to draw in and keep around a small loyal group of testers who are looking for their next HARDCORE PVP fix while they get the other rulesets in place.

Thinking about it that way I should probably revise the release estimate in the OP :v:

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