Crowfall Interview with the Developers .

So there’s that Crowfall Kickstarter all the cool kids are talking about. I like crows, but I hate falling. Luckily, the name’s a bit of a misnomer. Turns out it’s a developing MMO that centers on a “lobby” focused on land ownership and player interaction in a persistent world, with “campaigns” people can join for a limited time, reaping certain rewards to bring back with them to the persistent world. As a player who vastly prefers world PvP to instanced content, but doesn’t have the time to sit and protect bases 24/7, the idea behind Crowfall intrigued me. Using my special powers (read: emailing PR people), I was able to get the Crowfall team to a answer a few of my questions about the game. Join me to see what I dug up!

 

Crowfall: What is it?

When a new game is announced, there’s always the buzz words and phrases you hear: “sandbox,” “open world,” “hardcore,” etc. However, these are often relative terms. Darkfall’s emphasis on PvP and territory control with little interference from developers usually is enough sandbox for PvP fans, but not building fans. WildStar was billed as a hardcore raiding game, but you spend so much time not raiding- leveling, getting gear, key quests that it feels more like Guild Wars 2 if the game was just about loot.

So, what is Crowfall? “Eternal heroes, dying worlds” Your character is persistent, but the “campaigns” (think something like Guild Wars 2′s WvWvW) aren’t. That’s a bit simplistic though. There isn’t just one big battle to join whenever you want. You choose a campaign that has specific rules (3 faction, 12 factions, guild wars, or FFA are just some rules sets you’ll see), and spend time between the battles in that specific, procedurally generated world, and the persistent world reserved for, well, living.

This is very much a PvP world though. The creatures are supposed to be like zombies from The Walking Dead, making the world dangerous, but not as dangerous as your fellow players. The persistent worlds in the game can be pretty safe if a monarch sees fit. Yes, there are monarchs, yes they control the land, and yes, they can give you some, for a price, be it goods or services.

That sounds roleplay friendly, but don’t think of this as your usual roleplaying game. I’ve RPed myself, but I don’t follow pre-written scripts. I prefer something organic, as does the Crowfall team. If you want to sit in a tavern playing out a specific story arch, you probably won’t have fun with Crowfall. However, if you want to do, say, werewolves versus vampires, the Crowfall team is actually keen on opening campaigns specifically for that. Centaurs only, holy wars, warriors only… whatever seems popular enough to the team, they can make a campaign for it. In my experience, the best RP is done in a way that can get non-RPers involved, and believe it or not, your average player can enjoy RP when it’s not a fully scripted event. I actually tend to avoid RP servers just because non-RPers can actually be more accepting to this style of organic RP than many of the RPers I’ve encountered!

Crafters are in a similar situation. Again, this game does have a fair bit of combat. You can’t stick to your monarch’s lands and work there without help from adventurers braving deadly campaigns. However, Crowfall wants a fairly flat power curve. No one’s supposed to be able to master every skill, and there are limits in place to ensure this. Character creation has real punishments that will have few ways of “correcting” mistakes later, which means players will be rerolling based on the meta-game, which in turn helps make sure you’ll have a variety of customers to cater to. For those who don’t know, crafting in Crowfall has previously been revealed to be more component based, rather than the usual static recipe based.

Again though, this game’s a bit more destruction based. While there is voxel technology, it’s mostly for destruction. Yes, we can build castles, but the idea is people are trying to tunnel under bases, bust through gates, maybe even cave the roof in on you. I love Landmark‘s building (people make some cool stuff) but… I’m a digger. I like to turn mountains in plains, and plains into golf courses for me to pop in and out of like the gopher from Caddyshack.

This is just what the game’s planning for now though. Based on the Kickstarter, there are other things the team wants to do. As many people have probably noticed, the game’s lore is mostly for flavor. We don’t have a Thrall or Asheron really, so the focus is on the players. However, there are gods, and one possibility for the game (based on funding) would be to have GM events that involve the gods. While combat’s big, the game’s crafting is still fairly interesting to me, and the Crowfall team is willing to cater to other non-combat playstyles, again, there needs to be cash to build it.

For those interested in the game, I’ve also published the straight Q&A for you readers to give you something to chew on. Crowfall really wants to play with the genre, and I feel like it shows, though they certainly have a vision for the game and want to stick with it. Sorry poop guy!

 

The Interview

Laguna: One of the problems that often happens with games that allow a player to make whatever they want is that the player can create a very weak (“gimped”) character. After a few weeks/months/years, the character’s limitations take their toll on the player, and the player either must choose to quit the game or reroll. Does Crowfall do anything to mitigate this situation, or are you embracing customization, warts and all?

Crowfall Team: We are exploring some methods that have the player making hard choices at creation and a way to make some alterations at key points in the characters advancement. We’re also designing the game with a very “flat” power curve, so that minor differences in characters won’t result in major power swings.

That said, Crowfall is not designed to protect the players from making poor decisions. Part of allowing meaningful choice in a game is giving players the freedom to make decisions — and not all decisions will be equal. Choices must have consequence, or else they have no meaning. We believe that skill involves learning the game at the meta-level — not just making tactical combat decisions on a moment-by-moment basis.

 

Laguna: Crowfall recently revealed that it’s using voxel technology, but the emphasis is on destruction. Just the same, will there be any building with voxels in the game?

Crowfall Team: We will have building of fortifications in the Campaign Worlds, and building of various types of housing and other structures in the Eternal Kingdoms. These structures are made of parts, however — not created brick-by-brick. You won’t be able to make a recreation of the starship Enterprise in Crowfall.

 

Laguna: What, if anything, can you tell us about the fealty system? From the sound of it, it’s like a city ownership system.

Crowfall Team: The short version is yes: you can grant land to other people in the game, and they can subdivide that land and grant it to other players. They are vassals — in effect, tennants — and you can charge them taxes (in the form of goods and services) for the use of the land. As the monarch, you have administration rights over the Worlds as a whole, and they have the sub-rights within the domain they are granted.

Laguna: In a post on January 22, there was mention of the “servers” being unique different world.The reason for this being so that players can travel between them. Does this mean players can take part in several campaigns at once?

Crowfall Team: A player character that chooses to join a Campaign World is locked into that campaign until it is either won or lost. You travel from your Eternal Kingdom to a Campaign World when you join and come back after that Campaign World is destroyed. Every Campaign World has unique terrain — mountains, rivers, forests, castle ruins, villages, quarries, mines, mills — that is generated procedurally. You come into a new Campaign surrounded by the Fog of War, which will make the beginning of every Campaign an exercise in exploration and survival.

 

Laguna: Will characters be able to limitlessly skill up and gain any/all skills they want, or will there be some sort of skill cap/decay?

Crowfall Team: There are limits on how high a skill can be raised. This limit is affected by your Archetype, any advantage or disadvantage traits you took during character creation, and any Disciplines you may have taken.

 

Laguna: We’ve already seen that crafters will be included in the game, but what about other systems/play style support (animal husbandry, farming, music, sailing)?

Crowfall Team: While we have all kinds of ideas at this point on systems like this, but nothing specific we are ready to talk about. We’re going to start with crafting, and see how well our crowdfunding goes. Alternate professions would make fantastic stretch goals.

Laguna: Crafters/miscellaneous-non-combat-classes are often targeted by player kills since their point investments is, well, not in combat. While some games have their own solutions (i.e. Darkfall had craft skills grant stats faster than combat skills, so their lack of combat abilities were often made up by being able to hit harder or take more hits than most fighters), others… don’t. Can you share any ideas on how Crowfall may address this?

Crowfall Team: The vast majority of crafting skills are recipes are obtained through Discipline selection. Each character will be at least fairly effective in combat — thanks to our shallow power curve, and the base skills and powers provided by their Archetype. We believe that crafters will come in two flavors: those who are willing to brave the Campaigns (and will likely be in very high demand) and those who opt to remain in the safety of the Eternal Kingdoms (who will have to rely on other players to provide them with the resources they need to build and craft.)

 

Laguna: Crowfall seems like it’s mostly eschewing PvE, or at least, raids as most people know them. However, the game will still have PvE. What purpose does it serve, and how do you plan on making it interesting?

Crowfall Team: The environmental threat will be pervasive and serious. We want our worlds to have the threat level of The Walking Dead, where the environment itself is quite dangerous — but the real threat is the other players! The threats will vary by area, and intensify as the seasons progress towards winter in each Campaign. We think it’s going to make things very interesting, but you’re right — it’s not going to have the same feeling as camping a spawn in a traditional MMO.

 

Laguna: Will there be GM events in Crowfall, or are campaigns purely about player interactions with each other?

Crowfall Team: Event teams are a big deal for us — one of the biggest selling points of [Gordon Walton’s] first game (Shadowbane) was that we hired a dozen full-time people just to run events in the game. The program was really successful, at one point we polled the players and 50% of the respondents said they had participated in one of our events. That’s a crazy level of participation.

We’ve talked about it quite a bit, and we would love to do it… really, it comes down to funding. We’ve already set the foundation for it: we have a pantheon of twelve Gods, divided up into three factions: Order, Balance and Chaos. The Gods are major drivers in the narrative of the game, so it wouldn’t be hard for us to make them active participants in the game. We’re going to wait and see how the crowdfunding goes, and take it from there.

Laguna: There seems to be a basic story for the world of Crowfall, but I don’t feel like there’s a strong narrative- no main characters like Asheron’s Call’s Asheron, or Thrall in World of Warcraft. Have I missed something, or is this intentional?

Crowfall Team: There is a strong narrative, but it doesn’t serve the same purpose as a linear content game like World of Warcraft. The players are the main characters of this story; they are the ones actually making decisions and those decisions will affect (quite literally) the fate of each Campaign. Our narrative goal, then, is to provide a backdrop for these interactions: players are participating in a War of the Gods, so we are spending our resources fleshing out those Gods and their interactions (both with the other gods, and with their followers.)

 

Laguna: While developing Crowfall, have you included anything in particular for roleplayers? I’m guessing there won’t be any roleplaying campaigns, correct?

Crowfall Team: Shadowbane actually had some of the best roleplaying you would ever see in an MMO — specifically BECAUSE the players weren’t playing out a series of pre-written linear quests. When you allow players to interact, REALLY interact, roleplaying can add a depth and texture to the experience that you can’t really get from a game where you know the foundation is NPCs saying, “go do this task for me, then move along so that I offer the same task to the next player in line.”

Our design does not specifically segment players into traditional PvE, PvP, RP buckets (and Shadowbane didn’t, either.) Players will figure these things out on their own, if you give them the freedom to do so.

Everyone plays in the same Campaigns. Campaigns have custom rulesets. Some of those Campaigns may be Archetype exclusive, for example “Centaurs only” or require the characters to have specific Discipline runestones like Vampyre or Werewolf. The more popular a particular ruleset is, the more Campaigns we’ll make with those rules.

 

Laguna: What progression gets saved on your character or guild?

Crowfall Team: Everything gets saved, it’s an MMO! We don’t have details on guild rankings yet, but they are sure to be coming.

 

Laguna: I’m not sure if you’ve seen this but…poop. Is it something you guys might consider, or is this poster just crazy?

Crowfall Team: I respectfully disagree with OP on this one. I believe there is enough of that in these games, already. We don’t need to encourage more of it.

 

Laguna: Thanks for your time, guys, and good luck with the Kickstarter!