Crowfall

Bruman_sl said:

This is going to be a fun 2-3 years of people bitterly arguing over a game that doesn't exist yet, then when it's released for everyone to post for 1-2 months about why it's failing and how it didn't live up to expectations, then be basically dead by month 3.

Ya know, like every MMO released in the past, what 5-7 years?

Sure is fun though

Click to expand...

Don't forget the people like me, who see games on the horizon, generally ignore them, then when they come out they play them for months.




The initial design sounds great and it sounds like they're focused on combining the best parts of GW2 and Shadowbane. There's a few key problems they'll have to surmount:
1. Most 'grinding' in MMOs are boring as shit. We only find spawn camping lguk fun because we get a burst of endorphines when we get that phat fbss after sitting on our ass all day. The same is true for building castles. I was part of the group who had the first city in SB because we had many groups of people farming gold off boring ass mobs for incredible amounts of hours every day. We had the first keep in AoC for the same reason. One guy would just smoke a bowl and cycle mining nodes for literally a day straight. In ArcheAge we have arguably the strongest castle in the game and the stone was brought on the backs of many hours of boring-ass-mining. Why do we do all that? Because we want a castle damn it. It's not fun, it sucks, but we have a castle. I can tell you that few people who spent many sleepless nights farming to make that castle would sign up a second time to make another castle just so we could have that 'land rush' again.

GW2 I think was a great pioneer in that regard and it sounds like Crowfall wants to copy it. You had NPC run supply camps that would generate supply, then you had NPC mules (called dolyaks) that would slowly move the supply over to forts. Players could then use that supply to reinforce the keep, repair it etc. Players could go raise supply camps or the dolyaks.

I think this idea should be extended to an open world and extended further. Players should manage, invest and defend these supply camps but not operate them. The article clearly states that's their vision, but implementing it is hard.

2. When players care about the outcome of a campaign more than playing it (Ex: In competitive GW2 matches rather than ESO campaigns), the outcome of a campaign tends to be determined very quickly because one side will get an advantage, the 'casuals' on one side will get high morale and they'll start to get a numbers advantage because the 'casuals' on the other side will lose morale. Amusingly enough, we'd often come in hard for the first 3 days of a fight, whip our enemies then just take the next 4 days off and the non-hardcore pop on our side would still get the victory. Saying, "The losers will go back to the drawing board to figure out how to win the next campaign" sounds good, but when you lose a campaign then get rematched with the same people who just proved they have some 400 hardcore PVPers in the Oceanic and European time zone that will wreck you while you sleep and work, it's not really a fresh start.

GW2 addressed this problem with an ELO matching system and a three way fight. Both of these would be hard requirements for the campaigns. But I think it could be improved on, I won't say how until I know more about Crowfall, but it involves giving incentive to 2nd and 3rd place folks to team up with each other. In GW2 often the #1 guy and #3 guy would team up on #2 (Because #1 would strategically target #2 and #3 were pussies), or #1 and #2 team up on #3 (Because #1 and #2 were both pussies who wanted an easy fight).

The more tracking of accomplishments for players and guilds the better, and often it's just a matter of presenting information already stored in the game's database.