Crowfall

ZeitgeistGlee

http://crowfall.com/

WHAT IS CROWFALL?
Crowfall is a new type of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) brought to you by Gordon Walton (Executive Producer of Ultima Online, Star Wars: Galaxies and Star Wars: the Old Republic) and J. Todd Coleman (Creative Director of Shadowbane, Wizard101 and Pirate101).

The Worlds of Crowfall feature unique maps, rules, and victory conditions. Every World is different, and players join teams (Factions, Guilds or Noble Houses) to vie for control of each World.

We call it a Throne War Simulator, and it’s different in three fundamental ways: Time, Destructionand Power.


TIME
Eternal Heroes, Dying Worlds. Characters are persistent, but the Campaign Worlds are not. Players are Crows – Champions who travel from one world to the next, fighting an endless War of the Gods.

Each campaign world exists for a set duration – typically 1 to 3 months -- or until some "win condition" is met. During that time, the World will cycle through a single in-game year: Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. Through the course of the Campaign, the Worlds grow more sinister and deadly as the land is consumed by the Hunger – an unstoppable legion of the undead.
There are two types of Worlds in the Crowfall Universe: the Campaign Worlds, which produce materials (stone, iron and wood) and the Eternal Kingdoms, which are barren of resources -- but last forever.

At the end of Winter, the Campaign ends. A victor is declared, the map is wiped and the World goes offline forever. The players – the Crows – then fly back to their Home Worlds, to either count their spoils or lick their wounds before they choose a new Campaign and fight again.


DESTRUCTION
Everything Changes, and That Changes Everything.

The beginning of each Campaign is like the first round of "Civilization": players are dropped blind and naked into a harsh environment filled with deadly monsters, haunted ruins, abandoned quarries... and the most dangerous predator of all, other players. Craft weapons, scavenge armor, secure a stronghold, forge alliances and conquer the World.

Our Campaign Worlds are procedurally generated -- meaning that we use a technology library to automate the process of creating each World’s map. Mountains, forests, rivers, castle ruins, abandoned villages – each World is different, which means the game of territorial conquest will be different in every Campaign.

The worlds are also made of voxels (like Minecraft, only much smaller) – which means the entire world is destructible. We are harnessing VoxelFarm technology to generate an endless succession of unique and interesting Campaign Worlds for you to mine, shape, conquer and destroy.


POWER
If each Campaign is like a soccer match, the Eternal Kingdoms encompass the entire season! Unlike the Campaigns, these World are permanent -- and they are completely managed and owned by the players.

Players monarchs can divide up their domains into provinces, and grant those lands to other players as they see fit. Benevolent Monarch or iron-fisted Tyrant, what kind of Kingdom will you rule?

Your kingdom is your seat of power and base of operations. Kingdoms can be massive -- with mountains and rivers, monster camps and ancient ruins. But they are also devoid of resources: Stone, Metal and Wood. For these, you have to go off-world and brace the Campaigns of the Dying Worlds.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crowfall/crowfall-throne-war-pc-mmo

Anyone else looking at this? Friend showed it to me a week or so back and the more I look into it the more I'm intrigued by it. I've played most major MMOs since 2008 with varying degrees of interest but I've not seen something like this outside of maybe EvE albeit with a rather generic fantasy skin. The focus on PvP over PvE, and the varying degrees of PvP within the game itself is a cool concept that I can see appealing to both casual and hardcore camps.

I'm pretty tempted to go for one of the more expensive pledge packages but the combination of the crappy Euro/Dollar conversion rate and the inherent longevity worries that dog all new MMOs is holding me back. The fact they're going F2P with World of Tanks-esque VIP membership is a good sign though.

The_Valeyard

Looks interesting alright.

Gunmonkey

Backed this, was worried it would be like the old days of full player loot and losing progress if you die once or aren't playing with dozens of friends. But with the various types of campaigns that will be running at once (3 faction wars/12 god wars/guild fights) means there will be a variety of playstyles available.

Still a lot of hazy info, such as how the gathering of resources from a campaign. If you gather lots but lose because your side were zerged in the last few hours, do you end up with a fraction of your resources/is the resources you don't get passed to the winners? Could eventually lead to the gameplay style of just bum rush campaigns near the end to secure a quick win and gain resources and never bother mining/foresting.

Loving the artstyle though, hating the super realistic style the last crop of WoW clones use (Wildstar went stylised, but had many other problems).

ZeitgeistGlee

Pulled the trigger myself on Saturday when an early bird Amber came up. Would love to go for an EB Sapphire but I just can't justify the extra €200. Pretty amazed by how much the Kickstarter has risen by in the last 48 hours, starting to look like we might hit $1.7 million by the end.

JamesGoblin

They started new test session, here's how it looks like from payers point of view (just skip the first ~100 seconds, that's where he uses old footage to explain the game to his subscribers):

...some PvP:

...and, say, Van Helsing guinea pig (!) in action:

Still in alpha tests, open beta is scheduled for "summer 2017".