Crowfall

4. Can the character appearances be customized?

Yes. We will offer the ability to customize your character (hair styles, color and face) in Character Creation. Further customization can be done in-game, by collecting equipment.

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Centaurs current biggest negative is the warmth requirements. Not sure where they are going to get all that food in winter, the ganq squad quickly becomes the lame squad if your team has too feed that many of them.

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This is why we have begun to head towards the Tera end of the combat spectrum. Their combat looks great, however the price you pay is animation locking. The worry about long animation locks is why we tried split body mechanics first. At this stage of the project we can make those large kinds of steering corrections, later on it is much more difficult.

Keep the feedback coming.

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Combat has certain elements that are similar to Wildstar (our movement includes things sprints, dashes, and double jumps) and other elements that are similar to TERA (combo attacks that have short ?locked? animation sequences ? chains which you can opt to continue or break, for a cost.)

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The hard part about designing a game to have a real economy is that it permeates everything about the game. I mean, let's just backtrack it just a little, and you'll see what I mean.

You want crafters to matter. That means that loot can't be dominant over crafted items.
That means that killing monsters can't be the core activity of the game, it needs to support multiple pillars.
This blows up all your spawning system plans from the norm.
That means that your economy needs to support more than a simple faucet of goods and drains of resources.
That means you need decay or damage of some sort.
And potentially a different sort of banking system, potentially insurance, potentially repair...
That means you need item turnover, which means the death system needs to take that into account in terms of looting.
That means the combat system needs to take THAT into account.
That means the advancement system needs to account for the death system being unusual.
It also means the implications of things like soulbinding, level restricted gear, etc, all change.
If you're going to make the crafters matter this way, you need to design the maps around crafting.
Unless you want resource spawn camping, you need a different method for resource spawning.
If you're doing that, you may need entire skill trees, professions or classes built around harvesting.
If you're going to have a data rich environment like that, you may need a different database structure from the typical one for static worlds.
If you're doing a different database structure, are you enabling unique items?
If you are doing a rich environment, you have different kinds of data to hook AI onto.

You get the idea. Basically, it's a lot easier to decide to do this sort of an economic game, and then design everything else on top of it, than it is to try to glue or cgraft one into a traditional quest-and-level sort of approach. It has lots of implications about stuff like item turnover, crafter importance, what your loot tables look like, etc, and it completely changes stuff all the way down the basic data structures of the game.

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In an ideal world all an MMO client would do is render the scene and pass input to the server where the simulation was happening. With improvements in hardware outstripping improvements in network infrastructure, we've been working out ways to spread this work out more and more, but today (depending on your setup) what is slowing down your frames per second is more likely to be render related than simulation.

Perhaps it would be more accurate for me to not categorize it in terms of CPU and GPU, but in terms of threads of responsibility, where rendering was chiefly the one dominating your individual frame timeslice (except in special circumstances). The nature of our voxel processing allows that to run concurrently with minimal disruption of the core client systems in a more traditional MMO, and potentially net us wins in terms of rendering as a whole.

The point I wanted to get across was that while at first blush it might be reasonable to think that in order to get voxels we had to make sacrifices elsewhere (like large scale battles), but I wanted to assure all of you that voxels exist to serve the vision of the game, not the other way around. The things that brought you to this game (like siege warfare) will not be watered down for the sake of shiny new tech.

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That doesn't mean that the world will be constantly full of huge holes, however. We're thinking ahead with Terrain healing (And specific ways to prevent terrain healing, when required). It's top priority that the world still is playable, while allowing the freedom of exploration and destruction.

This technology offers us so much potential, it's important that we use it correctly!

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Yes there will be some placing of structures but not to the degree of a game like Landmark. We aren't too keen on seeing recreations of the Battle of Hoth, giant Doctor Who Tardis, or massive starships like the Galactica all next to each other in a fantasy setting.

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Our voxel implementation is primarily a CPU bound activity and benefits greatly from multi-core systems. The resulting geometry can be customized and optimized which actually helps in a lot of ways to alleviate GPU pressure. Because the vast majority of the world is dynamically meshed based on voxel data, things like LOD (Level of Detail) and culling (the world is already stored in a spatial tree) can become much more intuitive than dealing with a traditionally fixed and baked world.

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Building DURING a siege? That would be absurd! It's unlikely we would allow that.

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We're with you. Guilds need the tools to help maintain and grow. Without them they wither and die, or, splinter far too easily. We have no intention on letting our guilds just be a name tag and a chat channel.

As we get further into development we'll be able to more accurately say how we intend to support Guilds with their day to day functions.

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