Crowfall

I was a Kickstarter Sapphire Backer ($425. I exchanged all my VIP sub (rebought 2 years at less than they bought it back for) and a couple others things and ended up with some ridiculous $1300 in Store credit. I ended up buying a Kickstarter and 2015 small castle, 3 large Forts, 1 large Keep. Just a ridiculous amount of land and structures. Not sure why they made the decision because it does not seem to benefit them in the least. I still have like $600 in store credit.

IT'S A TRAP!

Maric said:

I was a Kickstarter Sapphire Backer ($425. I exchanged all my VIP sub (rebought 2 years at less than they bought it back for) and a couple others things and ended up with some ridiculous $1300 in Store credit. I ended up buying a Kickstarter and 2015 small castle, 3 large Forts, 1 large Keep. Just a ridiculous amount of land and structures. Not sure why they made the decision because it does not seem to benefit them in the least. I still have like $600 in store credit.

IT'S A TRAP!

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They were in a bad position of having the KS packages way too powerful, IMO. (6 years of time, etc)

It seemed like a good move to offer redeems this far away from launch..got rid of most peoples VIPS, allowing them to offer new items later this year. (I am guessing)

Some guilds have ridiculous amount of Places, castles, etc already..I will be curious to see how it works out.

I am in the same boat as you, Large castle, small, fort, keep and cash in the account for later.

UI updates incoming

New interview explains the game a bit more, and the direction it's heading.

Crowfall Interview - ArtCraft Entertainment Talks MMOs, the Industry, and More

Game designers is such a worthless fucking job title, as there's no education to become a game designer. It's basically a self-given title/profession, and the people who design games usually shouldn't because they lack creativity.

Reading the resume of these guys really turns me off. It's a long list of trying to mainstream very successful and fun niche games, and destroying them. If designers would stop trying to think, "how can we retain the most customers" and instead tried to make the most fun game they could, the people would come. That's how it used to be done, and you didn't need $100m budgets to create extremely entertaining games.

I honestly think I could design an amazing MMORPG.

I don't think action combat has any place in an MMORPG as it even it gets repetitive. Even Black Desert's combat got boring after a while, and they did a fantastic job with the animations and combat responsiveness. What hope does this game have? Combat responsiveness is terrible, animations clunky, and so forth.

You don't need a super fast-paced jump, around, blast everything in sight type of combat to make something fun. Look at CS:GO, combat is relatively slow and methodical compared to other shooters like Overwatch.

I'd be so much more thrilled for this game if they had just adopted a traditional RPG style of combat. Instead they're going to waste so many resources just trying to fix the animations, responsiveness, and abilities that almost all of the other aspects of Crowfall will suffer.

There was nothing wrong with traditional RPG combat. There are plenty of other areas to innovate that don't require near as much time, skill, and effort.

Making a good MMO is mostly knowing how to balance the limited resources you have. Making the most of what you have to work with.

Look at Ultima Online. Came out in 1997, had mounted combat, the best economy in any online game, a market for rares, the best housing in any mmorpg, and so many other features that newer games still lack. That's because they didn't have to spend a ton of resources on art and animations because they adopted a relatively simple overhead 2-d view that looked great. Ultima Online has aged better than any other game, besides WoW, graphically.

Combat is going to sink this ship before it even leaves harbor.

Woolygimp said:

Game designers is such a worthless fucking job title, as there's no education to become a game designer. It's basically a self-given title/profession, and the people who design games usually shouldn't because they lack creativity.

Reading the resume of these guys really turns me off. It's a long list of trying to mainstream very successful and fun niche games, and destroying them. If designers would stop trying to think, "how can we retain the most customers" and instead tried to make the most fun game they could, the people would come. That's how it used to be done, and you didn't need $100m budgets to create extremely entertaining games.

I honestly think I could design an amazing MMORPG.

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I think you're right! Back in high school (like 17 years ago) a bunch of us wanted to make a MUD together and that was pretty fun when looking back on it. This set me on a path to finding out how to learn to program because the project blew up shortly after it began. After this blew up, my best friend and I went off on our own and modified a copy of FastROM 2.4b (Ivan's OLC and copyover). This is where we started to really learn about game design on our own. We released this a few years later, in the early 2000's and it was mildly successful but a few years later in 2005 the code base (I pretty much did a total conversion on it by this point) was hitting its limit and RL got in the way so we shut it down. When we decided to restart it, from the ground up in another language in 2012, we sort of realized how much experience we gained from those previous projects. So far we've had a lot of fun and learned even more about the do's and don'ts. It'll be put to the test wen we leave beta next year.

I'm not saying we make great games but our small group of players seem to like it - far from it. I'm just a random guy who has a no-name MUD. But I think anyone with passion about games and is more concerned about making things fun and enjoyable for their players have the chance to make a fun and interesting game. This is why I think Steam is great and the large number of Indie developers/games on there. A lot of small innovation/different/unique games at low costs, this is just good. And the more people making games and learning what makes a good one, in their own unique way, is even better.

The act of designing a system and how players will use and interact it is awesome. I particularly enjoy looking to MtG for some inspiration - the thought of having various pieces interact in ways you can't predict is great. I always make sure to include some form of this in new classes to see what the players do with it. I've been surprised some times at what players do and how ingenious with them. Then, the reality sets in and I have to code it up, ahhh, that's the nature of things, I suppose

Lawrs_EQ2 said:

I think you're right! Back in high school (like 17 years ago) a bunch of us wanted to make a MUD together and that was pretty fun when looking back on it. This set me on a path to finding out how to learn to program because the project blew up shortly after it began. After this blew up, my best friend and I went off on our own and modified a copy of FastROM 2.4b (Ivan's OLC and copyover). This is where we started to really learn about game design on our own. We released this a few years later, in the early 2000's and it was mildly successful but a few years later in 2005 the code base (I pretty much did a total conversion on it by this point) was hitting its limit and RL got in the way so we shut it down. When we decided to restart it, from the ground up in another language in 2012, we sort of realized how much experience we gained from those previous projects. So far we've had a lot of fun and learned even more about the do's and don'ts. It'll be put to the test wen we leave beta next year.

I'm not saying we make great games but our small group of players seem to like it - far from it. I'm just a random guy who has a no-name MUD. But I think anyone with passion about games and is more concerned about making things fun and enjoyable for their players have the chance to make a fun and interesting game. This is why I think Steam is great and the large number of Indie developers/games on there. A lot of small innovation/different/unique games at low costs, this is just good. And the more people making games and learning what makes a good one, in their own unique way, is even better.

The act of designing a system and how players will use and interact it is awesome. I particularly enjoy looking to MtG for some inspiration - the thought of having various pieces interact in ways you can't predict is great. I always make sure to include some form of this in new classes to see what the players do with it. I've been surprised some times at what players do and how ingenious with them. Then, the reality sets in and I have to code it up, ahhh, that's the nature of things, I suppose

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Look at the traditional 52 card deck. There are nearly a hundred different games you can play with, all relatively simple; with certain games like poker having several layers of meta-game. I've played probably 10 million hands of poker, more than any live player could play in 5 lifetimes, and I admit there is still a lot to learn.

It's a case of simplicity having inherent sophistication. You don't need some crazy complicated action combat system to make something fun, as sometimes the most simple things in life are the most entertaining.

List of new questions and answers from yesterdays AMA.

09\16\16 AMA Qs&As (Full List) - General Discussion

Woolygimp said:

Look at the traditional 52 card deck. There are nearly a hundred different games you can play with, all relatively simple; with certain games like poker having several layers of meta-game. I've played probably 10 million hands of poker, more than any live player could play in 5 lifetimes, and I admit there is still a lot to learn.

It's a case of simplicity having inherent sophistication. You don't need some crazy complicated action combat system to make something fun, as sometimes the most simple things in life are the most entertaining.

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Absolutely. Being able to put together smaller simple pieces in different ways, to create new interactions or approaches, is definitely fun to play and experience. That concept is what really draws me into with MTG for example. On a whole, the majority of the cards are all fairly straight forward (with exceptions), but when you combine them together with a bit of randomness, and someone else deck, it is an amazing to experience. This simple depth has kept me in MTG over the years. Many MMORPGs seem to just to make some things complex for the sake of being complex, or make systems which seem to be complex at first glance but upon deeper insight, it is linear and really has no complexity. Heats of Iron 4 (a WW2 game) looks really complex but after you play with it for awhile, it boils to a few simple choices and the game becomes trivial. This is mostly due to poor AI but some poorly thought out design decisions contributes to this issue.

I believe Crowfall does some form of comboing in their game play? I don't have access to the alphas yet and have only causally followed the updates. I am not really a big fan of combo systems because I feel they like pigeon you into certain paths, which can't allow for any meaningful reaction as things change. I know FF14 does this but like CF I haven't played enough (only level 35) to say if it is good or bad on their implementation. I played a Paladin in EQ2 and I really liked the design of the abilities, the complexities of the tanking/pulling/how aggro worked, and then the twitch style game play to handle adds and different situations that came up. This is what was fun for me and I'd probably play that if my friends still played and I had time. I played BDO up to 45, and Tera up to 50, and while both games were fun in PvE, I just felt like it it was fairly simple. In particular, BDO was really boring after while because the PvE mobs were so weak and DG kept on nerfing them to make it have 0 challenge.

Also, on EQ2, it had such smooth movement and controls for combat, much like WoW. If I were doing some MMORPG, I'd 100% make sure this experience as top notch. I hate playing clunky games. I heard CF suffers from having clunky game play atm?

For the Crowfall combo system, are they adding paths or something, ie: use ability 1 and then you can choose from A or B depending on the situation? At least it'll give some sort of interesting choice based on the current situation.

Well you have a good point. When game companies try to introduce really complicated systems like combos and other things, balance becomes a nightmare, so everything becomes pidgeonholed (as you said) because they balance around particular path. There's only -one- way to do things. Look at Vanilla WoW with the complicated talent tree that people had to exp. with compared to now where everybody just selects 1 talent every few levels, and it's very, very obvious which is the most efficient.

Magic the Gathering is great because it's so balanced. There are five schools, and hundreds of combinations of those schools, and yet they are all balanced. A pure green deck can be just as good as a Green/Red deck, which is just as good as a Blue/Black, which is just as good as a Blue. And they maintained this level of quality and balance over dozens of expansions, with very few mistakes, which are cards that are just banned in competitive play. The "best" deck likely hasn't been discovered... so deckmaking is an experience.

I always enjoyed being able to tell someone's level, or level of gear, from looking at their character. Now games have each character looking exactly the same, with transmogs, and really only one identical set (or sets) of armor(s) that players gear up in the same manner. There's no difference, there's no being a special snowflake, and it's just really, really boring. Crowfall is like this. You have to be the same gender and same race for each class, no exceptions, and your gear looks the same as everybody elses.

I was always a fan of letting the classes be imbalanced as long as someone brings something unique and special to the table.

I'm not saying the game will be good or bad but I wish I had my $100 back. I'm just not seeing this game evolve into the game I had in my mind. For some reason the more I read and watch I see Rift. Not that Rift didn't have some good ideas and ton of potential in the beginning but they blew it. I don't see Crowfall really doing anything for me. With Legion really breathing some life back into my MMO enjoyment, despite work's best effort to limit my playing time, and i'm completed content with WoW and some Overwatch. Maybe i'll be surprised but I would much rather wait and see on this one than fronting the money.

If you can get past all the adds, new info regarding harvesting.

Exclusive Developer Blog: Harvesting!

Muligan said:

I'm not saying the game will be good or bad but I wish I had my $100 back. I'm just not seeing this game evolve into the game I had in my mind..

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Yeah, i am kind of in the same place right now. I wish i had asked for a refund before they actually started enforcing the refund policy.

Lawrs_EQ2 said:

For the Crowfall combo system, are they adding paths or something, ie: use ability 1 and then you can choose from A or B depending on the situation?

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Yes.

Muligan said:

I.. but I wish I had my $100 back. .

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Hypeum, Hopium and Herpes..... are they really that different? News at 11.

Last 2 weeks have been slow with news, but overall I am satisfied with the developments at the moment.

Testing will be going to full 24 hour sessions by the end of October. (With harvesting and crafting implemented around this time)

I hate the combat personally, but I can work with it.

FYI, the 2016 pledge packages are being retired tomorrow. The 2017 packages do not have the same value.