Crowfall

  • Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!



    Go here and give us your nominations!
    Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Teekey

Teekey

Mr. Poopybutthole
3,644
-6,335
I wasn't too impressed by the Gryphon concept art...but the in-game model is incredible.
 
Blackwulf

Blackwulf

N00b
999
18
So far I'm pretty much on board with everything. I don't really like cartoony graphics, but these aren't nearly as annoying to me as WoW or Wildstar. My only concern is that I'm, at heart, a big RPG fan more than I am an online game fan. I'm cool with the worlds resetting, and allowing for that gold rush feeling, but I definitely would not be cool with my character resetting; I want to progress my character through his experiences, and always maintain that feeling of growth.
 
M

Morphyous

50
0
Tuco_sl said:
A quick note/warning on the 'we're targetting a certain playerbase'. I think it's easy to say when the player base they're speaking of are the only ones paying attention. Cutting out challenging PVE raids removes a huge part of MMOs and the draw for a lot of different players. Same if they come out and say they don't want small time arenas (which I don't think they want?).


The number of 'hardcore pvpers' is a small group, and a fickle on at that. We rarely play an MMO for a long period. This could be because the MMOs we get are shit, but I think even in a perfect MMO it's hard to do the same shit over and over.
Click to expand...
That's where some of the campaigns come in. Less loss and risk for people that want more PvE stuff. This is what I'm imagining. The pace of those campaigns will be slower, with more of the traditional farm vs. computer.

If you want PvE, there's plenty of games for that. Just play WoW for a PvE experience, but for me it gets super boring, grinding the same stuff over and over again for the perfect gear from XYZ boss. Hardcore PvE would actually require dedicated healers and the trinity. Unless you somehow let people zerg rush from the graveyard to the raid boss.

PvE will exist in Spring and Summer and less so in Autumn and Winter. I'm hoping that Winter will have harder NPCs that drop more sought after materials for weapons/armor. My hope is that PvE during Winter will exist in the same way you might have a boss in DOTA2 (Roshan). He isn't critical to winning the game, but he gives a nice bonus and advantage if you kill him. Roshan is also something both sides can contest, and interesting battles should happen because of that.

I think for a PvE person, the biggest fear is being ganked and feeling like they wasted their time. I know a PvE person wants to go at their own pace, but honestly what made EQ awesome was that grouping up with people made everything much easier. Sure you could solo, but it would just take way longer than just meeting new people and taking down content.
 
M

Morphyous

50
0
Blackwulf_sl said:
So far I'm pretty much on board with everything. I don't really like cartoony graphics, but these aren't nearly as annoying to me as WoW or Wildstar. My only concern is that I'm, at heart, a big RPG fan more than I am an online game fan. I'm cool with the worlds resetting, and allowing for that gold rush feeling, but I definitely would not be cool with my character resetting; I want to progress my character through his experiences, and always maintain that feeling of growth.
Click to expand...
Your character will always be permanent and be stronger over time. You will have to pay a "tax" on materials you gather from campaigns is the only downside.
 
Muligan

Muligan

Trakanon Raider
3,231
901
I'm still curious to what comes out in ~20 days. I'm sure it is going to be the KS but these guys seem pretty creative with their approach. I don't think it will be your typical KS. I think they'll go all out. Then the question will be can the execute on promises. Once the word gets out and people start handing over money, you have to start making choices. You cannot satisfy everyone and you may also have to be honest with what can and cannot make it into the game. Looking forward to the announcement. Unless something changes, i'll back these guys but who knows where it will lead.
 
Tuco

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
<Gold Donor>
47,335
80,663
Morphyous_sl said:
That's where some of the campaigns come in. Less loss and risk for people that want more PvE stuff. This is what I'm imagining. The pace of those campaigns will be slower, with more of the traditional farm vs. computer.

If you want PvE, there's plenty of games for that. Just play WoW for a PvE experience, but for me it gets super boring, grinding the same stuff over and over again for the perfect gear from XYZ boss. Hardcore PvE would actually require dedicated healers and the trinity. Unless you somehow let people zerg rush from the graveyard to the raid boss.

PvE will exist in Spring and Summer and less so in Autumn and Winter. I'm hoping that Winter will have harder NPCs that drop more sought after materials for weapons/armor. My hope is that PvE during Winter will exist in the same way you might have a boss in DOTA2 (Roshan). He isn't critical to winning the game, but he gives a nice bonus and advantage if you kill him. Roshan is also something both sides can contest, and interesting battles should happen because of that.

I think for a PvE person, the biggest fear is being ganked and feeling like they wasted their time. I know a PvE person wants to go at their own pace, but honestly what made EQ awesome was that grouping up with people made everything much easier. Sure you could solo, but it would just take way longer than just meeting new people and taking down content.
Click to expand...
Yeah from the documents it's not clear if winter means that there's hardly any loot/resources and waves of badass NPCs are popping out of bushes to wreck you while you're just trying to survive Don't Starve style, or whether it means that in winter time all the badass versions of the NPCs will spawn and act as loot pinatas for the best gear that dominating groups can farm to take into the next campaign.


And Blackwulf, like Morphyous says your PC won't be erased. It's tough to guess what kind of hard/soft caps there will be and how important items will be in the game. My two biggest concerns are:
1. That the farming/leveling/gearing period is boring.
2. That someone who has gone through 50 campaigns has nothing to fear from someone who has gone through 5.



Regarding #1, I think Minecraft is a good analogy. You start off with nothing and there's a pretty basic build-chain where you go beat a tree down, make some sticks, use the sticks to dig some rocks up, use the rocks to tunnel into the ground and fine some iron/coal, then smelt the iron using the coal into tools, weapons and armor. This is the early game. From then you graduate into diamond where you perform an incredibly boring set of mining hoping to find diamond. It's annoying and after doing it a few times for a full set of stuff I never want to do it again. Crowfall is the same way, gearing up has to be fun and involve PvP or I'm out after a few campaigns.
 
Muligan

Muligan

Trakanon Raider
3,231
901
You guys have a chance to read this from JTColeman? Kinda crazy....

vague hint:
"I <3 D'Orion"

now, to your real question:

I am ALL IN on Crowfall. I've invested a big chunk of my savings. I left my cushy job. I gave up my safe little nest, and took a bold (arguably foolhardy) leap into the unknown.

Why?

Because I HAVE to make this game.

March, 2004: Shadowbane basically ruined me. I put everything I had into Wolfpack; I crunched for years. I spent all the money that I made from selling my previous company. I lost friends. I alienated family members. I'm not going to go so far as to say "shadowbane caused my divorce", but I will say: it certainly didn't help.

We shipped it, yes. and it sold well. But it was riddled with issues (technical, design, and operational) that caused it to bleed players like a sieve.

All that effort, all that cost, all that pain. and it just didn't work. We lost.

We sold the company to find a soft landing for the team. The founders? No such luck. Unemployed.

I had invested everything in Shadowbane, and walked away with almost nothing. For about a year, I basically fell off the grid, didn't do much of anything but think about what went wrong.

I'm over that, now. I'm not longer haunted by 'this went wrong' or 'that went wrong'. I'm years past the autopsy.

What haunts me is this: it ALMOST worked.

The vision we (the Wolfpack founders) had was amazing. The vision was right there, so perfectly clear in our minds. It was tangible. And, every now and then in development, the rarest of moments. A break in the storm clouds, the sunlight would pour through like a light from heaven and everything would just WORK. For a few moments, you could FEEL it. Ask the folks who played the SB beta, they can tell you what it felt like:

THIS IS IT.

THIS IS THE GAME.

THIS IS THE VISION.

IT IS REAL.

IT WORKS.


...and then the clouds would roll back in, fires would erupt all around me, and everything would go to hell again.

The idea behind Crowfall -- the original idea that pre-dates Shadowbane, that was born in a pizza joint as a scribble on a paper napkin -- that vision is my white whale. We had it once, right there, in our grasps. It was so close!

It ALMOST worked.

I've spent every day of the last decade learning how to build MMOs. Shadowbane was the first game that I ever worked on, remember. I made a ton of newbie mistakes. Say what you like about Wizard101, but we had a flawless launch and amassed over 50 million players. I've picked up a few tricks.

I learned what I need to learn about building MMOs. Launching MMOs. Running a live service. and with Gordon here, and the team that we have recruited, we can do this. We can make this game great.

This isn't just a game to me. I'm on a mission.

It is time to right a great wrong.

Todd
ACE
Click to expand...
 
Tuco

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
<Gold Donor>
47,335
80,663
Haha he sounds crazy enough to make this work. And now he doesn't have a wife holding him back.
 
Big Flex

Big Flex

Fitness Fascist
4,314
3,166
hes a fucking astrophysicist or some shit? dumped his wife over shadowbane?

Shadowbane was his first game and homeboy has been in his basement learning how to build MMOs for ten fucking years?

Brad is sitting around farting on floppy discs trying to make Guk and this guy is all likehttp://youtu.be/755-fFD6hb0?t=6s

I don't care if this fails, he can have some of my money.
 
Big Flex

Big Flex

Fitness Fascist
4,314
3,166
GordonWalton

Todd and I met back when I was running UO and he was building Shadowbane. One thing you might not know is that the game development community in Austin is quite collegial, and almost all the studio and game leaders socialize, even if their companies are competitive. We kept in touch over the years, mostly by having lunch a couple of times yearly. Frankly, we never thought we'd work together because we both tend to work on long term projects and the idea that we could sync up never really occurred to either of us though we certainly liked and respected each other.



Early in 2013, we had arranged our normal periodic lunch. As we greeted each other,Todd said "I've got something to tell you" and I (being the brusque person I am), said "No, I've got something to tell you, I've decided to leave Disney and I want to start a new company". Of course, he had been about to tell me he was leaving Kingsisle and wanted to start a new company! We were both bit shocked that we were doing this at the same time, and immediately started talking about the marketplace, what we saw that was not working well and where the opportunities might be for something that would shake things up. In that conversation we realized that we had very similar worldviews and desires around how to build a game company and what kind of products to create. We had a couple of follow-up meetings and within a week or so decided to try working together. And from that start over the next few months we created ArtCraft Entertainment and started the process of creating the vision for Crowfall and the building the team to create it.



It's been a blast so far (at least from my perspective!). I love partnering with strong creative people while I worry more about the nuts and bolts of execution, and Todd is certainly amazingly creative guy!
Click to expand...
 
M

Morphyous

50
0
Tuco_sl said:
My two biggest concerns are:
1. That the farming/leveling/gearing period is boring.
2. That someone who has gone through 50 campaigns has nothing to fear from someone who has gone through 5.
Click to expand...
I think for any game we go through the leveling process at first because everything is new. I don't have any issues the first time around because I will feel more powerful as I progress.

A person with better gear and player progression should easily own someone who just started. The thing is that a new person "should" be able to find a guild or friend to give him gear which could put him on par with the geared person. Assuming both players have similar skill.
 
Big Flex

Big Flex

Fitness Fascist
4,314
3,166
personal progression is skill-gain based with the bulk of it being passive progression ala EVE.

there are no levels.
 
Big Flex

Big Flex

Fitness Fascist
4,314
3,166
Crowfall_WinterHellcatConcept.jpg
Crowfall_HellcatConcept.jpg
- Once we had the base concept locked, we broke the "Hunger" effect into stages. We wanted to sell the idea that the Hunger spreads like a disease, and it happens over time -- twisting and corrupting a creature so that, by the onset of Winter, it becomes unrecognizable.
- Once we had the various stages in mind, we jumped to the Winter and created a high-res image. The goal here was to visualize the musculature and Hunger effects in detail.
- That image was then used to create a high polygon model, a 3D sculpt of the cat in all his (her?) glory. After modelling, we textured (painted) her -- including lighting, diffusion and reflection layers. The model was then rigged with an internal skeleton, and animated. The final result of this process can be seen this video:
Click to expand...


That's it for Hunger Week. We'll continue with more updates next week -- though we will be going back to the more reasonable "every few days" pace. (Hunger week was kind of brutal, to be honest! From our end, it seems like we dropped a mountain of information.)

Anyway, thanks again for being part of the Crowfall community, and if you want to ask any of the CF team questions about any of the above steps, hit them up in this forum thread, already in progress:

Todd
ACE
Click to expand...
 
K

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
There used to be a hibernian class in daoc that could transform into a big deer moose thing and it always scared me when I saw it happen (from the albion side)
 
Muligan

Muligan

Trakanon Raider
3,231
901
I'm having flashbacks of Rift. Don't get me wrong, I loved Rift in the beginning but quickly became bored. In all fairness, maybe I misunderstood the use and intent of the rifts but in my mind I really felt they would be more apart of the game. I remember everyone would run to rifts and with in a month or two, people really just became annoyed with them and left them behind. In my mind, I thought rifts would be something worth fighting over and/or something you put aside your factional differences and would band together to fight to save the zone, then you killed each other.

Point being, their concept sounds really cool and fun. I'm a little excited with their direction and thinking. However, can they make it part of the game? I think MMO's run into a problem of making the most efficient method of developing and progressing your character is grinding out some form of instances. Not the EQ didn't have its own grind but I really hate to see people just remove themselves from the gaming world to hide away until they are geared up. Then they just hide away in raids. If this "winter" is their central concept, I hope it is something everyone find themselves forced to be part of...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.