The new MMO Crowfall is currently in the Kickstarter phase and presents its concept in interviews. In doing so, it almost ritualistically distances itself from World of Warcraft.
The Kickstarter campaign for Crowfall has begun, and the gaming industry veterans behind the project are on a major press tour. Leading the way are J. Todd Coleman, the former head behind Shadowbane, and Gordon Walton, who had a significant say in Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, and SWTOR . The two use their big names to promote the project. Crowfall, it is said in an interview with PC Gamer, is “Game of Thrones in a DOTA-2 way.” In another interview with gamespot, it is referred to as a “child of the parents Game of Thrones, EVE Online, and Shadowbane.”
Everything but WoW
On what it shouldn’t be, there is quite a consensus: Definitely not World of Warcraft, no clone, no shared DNA, nothing like that. The WoW curse has haunted MMO makers throughout their careers. Even during the WoW beta, they realized it could become big and change the entire industry. And so it has.
Later, they were constantly faced with WoW in meetings. Investors always asked what percentage of WoW’s player base they could reach with their own project and how their MMO would compare to World of Warcraft. Anyone wanting to reach WoW’s numbers had to present a concept that sounded quite like WoW. The birth of the Warcraft curse, which would paralyze the MMO genre for the next few years.
Such WoW numbers are not what they want to reach with Crowfall. They do not want to create a game for the “masses,” but rather consciously cater to a niche. Even with 100,000 players, they would be very satisfied. If they were to target the masses, they would have to develop for them, and that is something no one on the Crowfall team wants to do. Therefore, they hope to raise enough money through Kickstarter to cover the MMO alongside their own investments and what strategic partners contribute. Should Kickstarter fall short of expectations, they do not see it as a tragedy: They have experience in gathering traditional funding.
A lot still up in the air
As both interviews hint, there are mainly ideas at the moment. They are quite substantial. For example, they want to solve the endgame problem. They see this in a PvP game where eventually players win, create an insurmountable lead, and keep newcomers or returnees “down.” They aim to change this by resetting the world repeatedly while keeping the player characters. This should also solve other problems, as balance errors will only have a short duration and will not matter in the next campaign.
As one of the main ideas, they plan a kind of anti-landmark; in the preliminary stage to Everquest Next, it is mainly about building things with voxels; in Crowfall, it will primarily be about destroying things. This seems quite fitting in a world with a finite expiration date.
Otherwise, in this stage, there are primarily ideas but little concrete planning. In the economy, players are meant to be decisive and important; in the combat system, they want to rely on player skills and realistic physics; and regarding game modes, the team plans various rule sets with play durations of a month or more. For example, one can imagine a three-faction battle: Two factions fight for dominance, while the third seeks to maintain balance between the two forces and wins if neither of the others has gained too much of a lead in the end.
There is no timeline for Crowfall yet; the Kickstarter campaign starts today, and we will report on it explicitly later and go into more detail about the planned features. As a payment model, they have aimed for Buy2Play with a subscription option.
If you want to learn more about Crowfall, we have introduced the game here.
