Crowfall

Combat has came a long way just hard to test group pvp with current netcode. If netcode gets fixed for large skill combat we have something here.

Vinjin said:

Whoa! That sounds like the complete opposite of fun to me.

Hard, tedious and challenging, but definitely not fun.

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You have to remember I was solo for most of it. It is meant to be a team based game and much of the issues would go away with a more full test of many more systems.

Interestingly enough I got back on again last night after writing this and got together with a couple of people and had more fun. We did some base crafting and had some success, and amazingly enough when you are part of a 3 on 1 then it seems much more fun. I think that I am an asshole though for enjoying it.

Meh. I love the idea. The game needs work but it is a pre alpha. What comes, comes.

Gathering skills matter!

I was hating on the game due to the potions use, but the potions are a hack the devs put in since noone had any gathering skills. Of course what does that tell you when they make them last 10 minutes. That they want tedium I guess.

This game is going to be all about guilds and friends. Hell the ore nodes and stone nodes have larger nodes that you need at least 2-3 people to mine effectively. They are surrounded by 4-6 smaller single player nodes though so people leave the motherlodes up.

One very odd/infuriating/kinda dickish thing is when you mine the ore pops out in a chunk that you have to walk over to pick up. (no key required) So other people can grief you on your own faction and stand around and ninja the ore you just popped. Thankfully people are not doing it much, but damn that is a griefers wet dream.

The combat is getting better with practice, it is still a little floating but it is also growing on me.

The crafting is fucking insane. You have to drink potions at the moment due to their stupid fucking skills system to get the skills to craft effectivly and you still sometimes fail after trying to make something with a 97% skill success rate. Of course the reason it is insane is the research ability. After selecting something you want to make like say a staff for your druid. You need to collect a few things.

Planks - Easy enough right. Check out the woodworking tab hmm I need 3 wood to make. Of course it must be the same wood type and grade, but no problem those variants stack in the bags. So lets use oak for example. Oak advances Crit chance in a weapon crafting situation. So I make my potion to help me make things. 74% chance to make it, only costs 2 ore of any grade/quality so use the cheap stuff. But that boosts my create chance to 95% and it is a 20 minute potion. Fail at making it 3 times. but make it the 4th time so that cost me 8 cheap ore. Then I make the 2 other hack potions that make crafting possible, also on 20 minute timers and cost any type of ore. But I now have a choice, use up some more valuable copper or iron, or go get some more slag. Grrrr I don't have the gathering pots running because they are on a stupid frustrating 10 minute timer, so I just bite the bullet and choke down my copper/iron expensive hack potion. Of course it fails. So I waste more time and resources testing a game that I already paid for months ago like a gormless buffoon. And make the two potions I need to try and possibly test out something. Remember I wanted to make a plank for a staff for my druid that is better than crap starter gear.

Anywho, I now have the pots and I am going to make the plank for the staff body. I need three planks to make up the body. No problem I use oak because that is what I have, along with some yew. Hmm oak makes crit chance like I noted before but Yew makes increased life leech. hmm... well I have enough to do 3 of each, maybe I'll mix and match. I end up not failing any of the plank combines outright but the crafting is complex remember. After you put in that first roll for abject failure you get a window for "experiments" The pot gives me the ability to do this and gives me 75 skill and 10 "pips" to burn on an experiment. The oak is a single stat combine of crit chance but there is also durability to consider so I can put 3 pips into each for a nice random roll of how good this plank is going to be. the reason I can put 3 pips in is the oak is white quality, they have the same rankings as most mmos, but everything including most sub combines have vastly different stats depending on grade and quality. the higher the color grade the more pips you can experiment with, but that also makes it require more skill in crafting.

Now remember I have glorious potions ticking away that give me the skill to do this wonderful testing, so I rush through this and since I have 10 pips of experiment skills or whatever I mash the go button after picking all the pips. and you get a reaction as it go through the randomiser. there is crit failure, failure,success, moderate success, good success, great success, and amazing success, hell there might be stuff past amazing like a BJ from a porn star success... who knows.

Anyways, I get my plank of godly white gear critical chance oaken goodness. Except it failed the experiment stage and came back as failure, so I don't get any bonus stats other than base. But I have two more combines to go! Now to be honest this only takes a few seconds overall but each one of those sweet darling chunks of wood was gotten on a pvp server filled with people who want to kill you and take your shit. Each one of those planks of wood was prefaced by at least 10 ore to get the potions and that is not counting the mats that went into the rune based pick I had to make to get the ore in the first place.

Those planks I lovingly handcrafted are like my children, of course the first one failed it's experimental stage so it is the retarded child, but still, Children damnit! So I make the staff head with my amazing child, my basic success child and my retarded child er oak wood.

Thankfully this really did not take all that long to combine in game time so my potions are going strong. Ticking away like grains of sand in an 20 minute glass of basic skill. (god damned 20 and 10 minute potions.)

So I get a good success on my Staff head! Yay go me. Sure it is only one piece of three but I am closer to mediocrity every day!

Welp I snapped. Had to get a talking to from Tyrant (Gordan - one of the head cheeses)

I was bitching all over the servers about the shitty potions hack they used to get people mining and crafting. They made potions to spoof skill in crafting and gathering. 3 potions in crafting. One to help combines base chance (from 74% to 95% with a pot running) Another pot to give experiment ability and a third to give the pips needed to use the experiment ability. Those three pots have a 20 minute timer, and were used because extremely few people have used the skill tree to get any skill in ANY crafting. (Skill trees are passive time based things and go up online or offline, you pick what to train next then Ding three days later you have the skill.)

The major issue is the 10 minute buff potions they give you so that you can harvest materials. There are 6 different potions. All with 10 minute durations.
They did this to help test the gathering. Without it you can hammer away at a basic rank1 slag ore node and get 1-2 chunks of ore after about 12 seconds of picking. With 4 of the 6 potions active, harvesting is fun. It is doable with a crummy basic pick. But with a good pick you can get ore in around 12 seconds and get 1-2 pieces at each of the 25% hits of the node. But do to the potions you get a bountiful harvest proc on the last hit. And at times 8-16 chunks of ore comes raining down. Plus the critical hit potions can strike and get better quality as well. This gets the lizard brain working. It is fast and much much more fun.

It is a test. Hopefully potions go away or they got what they needed and we can get longer duration potions. Because that part was so god damned not fun.

However the crafting is quite deep, but kinda worthless right now. Due to the materials cost and the potions tax. The basic armor is too good as well. Making an advanced set of gear is a pretty good amount of mats. for wors than the basic gear. If you do all the fiddly sub combines you can get better than basic gear but that takes tons of time and mats.

The weapons however are a major upgrade. So you have people skilling into pvp combat skills with upgraded weapons. Either fighting each other or coming to kill the crafters. Who are in basic gear. With many distracting limitations and tunnel vision and ten minute potions.

Right now it has potential but that is it. This shit is flat out not fun.

Spent about 20 minutes dicking around with this the other day. Srathor nailed most of my impressions (although I didnt get nearly as far into crafting). Combat feels floaty to the point where I was having trouble figuring out whether or not my skills were actually doing anything. Perhaps I just jumped on at a bad time but the enemy healthbars didn't seem to respond to my attacks in any meaningful way and the enemies themselves were flying all over the place mid combat doing god knows what.

Gathering isn't fun for me at this point due to the large stamina cost (resource shared with the dashes that let you move node to node quickly). I spent as much time waiting for stamina regen as I did harvesting

Shit feels very alpha. Core systems seem cool in concept at least, its just clear that I'm not cut out to test this one.

They have a completely different system than most mmo's.

You have one character per account. That character is a spirit crow. You inhabit bodies on the world to actually interact with the world. But the bodies are disposable. Hell they have necromancy build into the game as a tradeskill. you can go dig up body parts and make a better body than the free white quality one from the temples.

The only safe area is going to be the eternal kingdoms. That is where your crow spirit basically lives. When not out on a campaign (to the different worlds.

Right now they have a lot of placeholder mechanics because they do not have the full cycle of modules built. So instead of the eternal kingdoms you have a server called Sanctuary. It is PvE, and no pvp is allowed. It is populated by some really broken AI mobs. and has only tier 1 resources to gather. (Slag ore, knotwood trees, and cobblestones.) You can build the grey basic gear there, after inhabiting a husk. (A white quality Archetype of your choice. )

Another hack they have built is the spirit bank. Basicly the bank to transfer items between worlds. you can drag items from your husk to the bank and it takes 2 minutes before you can do anything with it. (which right now is only to remove it from the bank.) If you bring something down to your husk on one of the worlds it sits in your bags for 2 minutes before you can do anything to it.

They have multiple rulesets and maps that are considered campaign worlds. Each world can contain a husk for you to inhabit. If you want to play a different archtype from the first one you made you can go up to a different archtype statue and kill yourself, then inhabit the new archtype white quality body that the gods give you. (inventory of the husk transfers to the new body, and the new body uses the same spirit bank)

They have had multiple maps so far, but they are working on 2 at the moment. Scorn is a faction based map. It divides the players into three factions Order, Chaos, and Balance. You choose a faction and are locked into that faction for the rest of the campaign world. you are safe from your own faction but the others are red. There is no safe area at all. Other faction members can kill you and camp your body if they like. There are three temples to each of the three factions spread apart a bit on a portion of the overall map. When you die in one of the temple areas you are supposed to respawn as a crow in one of the other temple areas to prevent spawn camping, but if there are three groups of enemies camping you are going to have a bad day. When you die your corpse is lootable to the victor, but only bagged gear, worn gear is safe from looting, but takes a durability penalty. You can interact with a huge statue in the center of the temple to get back your violated corpse and re inhabit it, the items in inventory will be what the killers left you and worn items.

The corruption map is a free for all map from the start, it has higher risk so has higher rank nodes as well. 5 man groups can form and not be damaged by friendly fire, and I am sure guilds will work the same at some point but the guild system is not in yet.

The whole game is being built around risk vrs reward, more risk = more reward if the devs do their job right. Scorn is considered a lower risk campaign world so has crafting mats and harvesting nodes in the middle band. Rank 4-7 nodes populate the map. With the grey nodes around to make basic gear as well. The pvp worlds have a range of nodes of the various types. Wood, Stone, Ore, Graveyards, and more are coming. Like there are yew trees and oak trees and birch trees and a few other types. Same with the other nodes. When you mine a node depending on the rank it can drop ore of that type and of varying quality, like the standard color scheme grey, white, green, blue, purple, orange. The quality of the ore is the same once it is fixed. Like a white quality gold chunk from a rank 8 node, is the exact same as a white quality gold chunk from a rank 4 node. The ranks just signify the chance of what quality will drop from the node as it is mined.


The combat is a bit floating but fun. The mining is working but not fun at the moment without a potions hack I mentioned many many times before. With the potions it feels good, but it sucks as an unskilled plebe.

And the skill system is horrible for a test environment you learn a skill for your crow at the account level and it is a time advancement system, passively trained. And even the basic starting node takes 3 days to train.

However everything is subject to change. It is PRE alpha right now and right now while elements of fun are to be had, it is definitely not fun to try and play as a game.

Which leaves me scratching my head because I can't wait till Thursday to try and log in and see what changes they are making. BAH!

Crowfall Combat Disciplines

Never played Shadowbane, so this seems kind of cool to me.

Things are definitely moving at a faster pace. (Pre-alpha wise)

Learning skills is very much like training skills in EVE. You can queue 4 or 5 skills and train them in tandem. But it's going to take a long long time to get through the skill trees.

Personally, I am liking gathering/crafting. And doing so on PvP server brings that element of danger that makes the game exciting. I kind of disagree on some of the opinions about combat here. I've been in many PvP fights, both solo and in group. And combat feels pretty good in the latest build. I don't find it 'floaty'. I think some of the skill timers need some tweaking, but I think they are getting fairly close to having a responsive combat rotation. I think the combat skills themselves are in really good shape, even for this stage of development. Really looking forward to Eternal Kingdoms testing.

Did another weekend of testing. Same basic build for the servers, with a few small changes to some of the things that were causing lag.

The reason I said the combat feels floaty is simply because I have been playing Black Desert and Wow a lot, both of those have very good locked down combat. Black deserts is more actiony, and wow is wow. Solid, feels good but also 14 years old.

Same issues with the potions, I am a week longer into the skills training but that is really a joke. The potions are giving effectively 100 skill in each of the gathering stats important numbers. How much you get, how many crits you get to upgrade from basic white ore, how much you get if you get a crit that doesn't upgrade from basic white ore. and a Buff that lasts like 40 seconds to help crits hit the final dink in a node to give you a money shot of ore.

When you get that money shot of ore it is a good feeling, sploodges of ore all over the place, some green some blue hell even a purple or two. Otherwise you get a spurt on the 1/4ths like 1 maybe 2 white ore. Very randomly you get a green on a lucky crit.

After 2 weeks of the passive skills training I am seeing that while this might be a neat idea to replace "Leveling" like in other mmos. It is just not fun. The times for leveling into a new node are stupidly long. The first skill is 3 days to learn. And some go to 6 days then 12 days and so on, thi is to replace level 1 to level 2. Imagine wow with 3 days to level to 2. Then 3 more days to level to 3. Oh and you can't do anything worthwhile feeling till you get to level 5. And even then that is only to let you hit on a copper node. And after 10 nodes you have gotten 10 ore. And broke that cheap ass pick some nice guy gave you.

Anyways. Basically I paid for this. I am going to spend my time trying some of it and bitching on the forums and the chat server till they throw me out.

They have some great ideas. And they are implementing them very very poorly. Fun is not on the menu, hell I don't even know if they care about fun in anything except ganking baby seal players who just spent 60-500 bucks on thier product.

The vision I think is very alive.

To be honest, the passive skills training seems something I could embrace. I always kinda hated it when I had to "work" for experience, since I am so bad at grinding. This is one of the things I liked about Pathfinder Online system. Pay a monthly fee, accrue a set amount of xp per month that you can then use for skills. Eve has something similar and it always interested me, though the game itself not so much. You still had to "grind"for certain achievements in PFO before you could buy certain skills, but that never felt like a grind: it kinda happened naturally.

As I understand, Crowfall does not charge you for this passive accrual of xp/skilll points? Or can you buy more skillslots to accrue passive xp in?

Ok, I think I will start to read up more about Crowfall instead of asking these newbie questions. I have to say that my interest is starting to get peaked, at least these guys seem to be making a real game from the ground up, rather then showing us mock videos of "what could be".

After seeing how the pancakes are made, I still want fucking pancakes. I just wish it was a better experience. A shitty playtest experience with no nda is a dangerous concept to me. High risk with little reward, I would think they would want a better experience for their customers.

The only reason to have skills advance at such a glacial rate is the skills farther in the tree do not work yet so they are delaying till they work. Now in release the glacial pace is fine if they want it that way. As one of the devs said it is time sunk by then. But for a testing situation that you have to create massively disruptive hacks just to make the game testable (10 minute potions for skills) it makes little fucking sense.

I love the idea behind the game. I even love much of what they have done so far. But the play experience is shit after the shiny wears off. And that is due to the direct results of the devs giving tools that force you to test like "this".

You are entitled to your opinion.

I don't think he is a peice of shit. I think he is doing what he can to live and make games. Might not be games we want to play, but it is his choice and chance. All I have ever heard from you since your first post has been angry, spiteful, and extremely negative.

Gordon when he talked to me was first to get me to calm down and take a step back. Second it was to explain some things. He was polite, hopeful and tried to help me understand his side of things. Yeah I severely dislike this part of the testing, but still see what could happen. Sure it might be a shit sandwich, but right now it is just the beginnings and they do have great ideas. They may never get those ideas made due to "reasons" but then again noone else has made any of those ideas into reality either.

I am speaking of my opinion of the game. You just seem to hate everything. Have a good day.

I check their patchnotes and see things about recipes and nodes and cooldowns and my eyes glaze over.

Send these old horses to the glue factory. Maybe some up-and-coming game devs will sniff it and come up with something interesting instead of the same stale horseshit.

Kind of looking forward to the servers going live 24/7 instead of this weekend snap test B.S. Really digging the new Templar class. Very well could end up being my main (if there is such a thing with this bizzaro vessel system)..

A challenger approaches? Some WoW dev offshoot studio making a similar fantasy survival faction pvp Temp MMO: Frostkeep Studios

Looks eerily similar but appears to be non MMO inasmuch as it seems like a survival game where you create temporary servers with one random world that eventually dies off as invasions keep getting stronger, ie missing the EK portion.

Very similar intent, though slightly biased to survival gameplay side it looks like. Going to be honest, still my biggest worry about CF: logistics. Eve is a dumpster title to me because you have to shove so much time into it in order to do the fun part just to essentially kit out "unlimited" copies of the "character" (ship) you actually want to play. In the same way I feel like CF will suffer from the same problem.

Maric said:

Kind of looking forward to the servers going live 24/7 instead of this weekend snap test B.S. Really digging the new Templar class. Very well could end up being my main (if there is such a thing with this bizzaro vessel system)..

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Well ultimately yes, skill system would sort of lock you into a few (one) classes to be able to use them well. You can still swap to something you desperately need on the field right now but even a full kit body won't be as good without skill support.