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Crowfall details starting, finishing, and resetting by Hunger
The latest development blog from Crowfall establishes a problem. The nature of any sort of permanent game is to fall into stagnation. Eventually, the most powerful players control everything and there's no room for new people to come in. You want room for new people to come in. But you also want to have long-term effects to what takes place in the game rather than just resetting everything as the game approaches a static state. What's to be done? According to the aforementioned development blog, you reset... but by pieces. At the center of Crowfall's design lies a cycle of birth, corruption, and demise. Characters remain, but as they participate in individual campaigns of the game there's space for players to make a lasting impact on the game world. But the continual destruction of each campaign as certain players "win" ensures that there's always space for something new to happen, that no one ever becomes unassailable in every sense. Take a look at the full post for a clearer picture of how the game intends to keep players engaged by periodically wiping the board clear of pieces.
Crowfall's Legionnaire is a four-legged powerhouse
Today's a series of firsts for Crowfall reveals. It's the first glimpse of the game's second announced class, the Legionnaire. It's the first look at a character who is other than human -- and is in fact a Centaur. And it's the title's first in-game environment screenshot. Crowfall has also posted a handy FAQ that goes into depth about the character creation process, teases Mac support, and eschews traditional MMO levels as a means of progression.
Raph Koster is collaborating on Crowfall [Updated with video]
So here's a funny story: Yesterday, the Massively writers were shooting the breeze in team chat when the subject of sandbox devs who were not also closet-gankers came up. "When do you think Raph Koster will finally make a new sandbox?" I asked, half kidding and half wistful. "Never," Jef answered. Then we commiserated for a bit. It turns out we were remarkably prescient because that day is... today. ArtCraft, the studio working on the nebulous PvP MMO Crowfall, announced today that Koster, the backbone of sandbox legends Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, has been collaborating with the Crowfall team on the game's design for a year already as a "formal advisor and design consultant." "Raph and I have been working together for about a year on the design architecture for Crowfall," ArtCraft's J. Todd Coleman wrote. "At the heart of this game, we have two core systems: dynamic territorial conquest and a player-driven economy. Marrying these two concepts is the holy grail of MMO development, and Raph is arguably the best person in the world to help us solve this puzzle." Koster gets a blurb of his own in the PR: "There isn't anything on the market like Crowfall, and it has been a long time since some of these design ideas were explored. There's a very specific audience out there waiting for a game like this -- the conflict, the real economy -- that has been looking for new steps beyond the games of ten years ago." Your move, MMO genre.
