An interview provides more insight into Crowfall, its development, and what the game wants to be for its players.
Interview about the specifics of Crowfall: The developers of Crowfall discuss in an interview with mmorpg.com what Crowfall is supposed to be and how it differs from other games.
What does Crowfall want to become?
mmorpg.com spoke with Creative Director J. Todd Coleman, Executive Producer Gordon Walton, and Vice President of Marketing DebySue Wolfclaw about Crowfall. There were also comparisons made to Game of Thrones.
Campaigns constantly change everything: In Crowfall, there are campaigns that behave almost like standalone games within the game. Campaigns often have their own rules, are subject to the seasons, and can be “won.” To expand your kingdom, you need to gather resources from campaigns with up to 1,000 players.
Coleman: “Every new campaign that starts with a new map and new rules is a new opportunity for us to gather completely different experiences. As a designer, that excites me the most personally.”
In this area, Crowfall differs significantly from other games. Coleman continued: “Normally, I only get a start with an MMO. I know that may seem financially correct for Crowfall. But from a design standpoint, I’m usually constrained by the rules we established at launch that I can’t change without it being a bigger problem for the community. Unless it’s clearly a change for the better.”
The rules constantly change in the game itself. When asked if this seasonal setup doesn’t exactly allow for saying that everything will change next season, Walton added: “Exactly, that was one of the core pieces of the puzzle. We don’t want to get stuck on one path. Because then there come nerfs and [things like] ‘You’re changing my player experience!’ No, we even promise that we’ll change your player experience.”
Crowfall feels episodic: Through the campaigns, a dynamic comes into play that the developers compared to other games. It is difficult to market the game correctly when it combines so many things.
“It’s a bit like WoW. But actually more like EVE. But it’s completely dynamic. It’s actually stories driven by the players, not by us. You won’t be led on rails,” Coleman said.
Coleman even adds a comparison with well-known series: “The maps are completely procedurally generated. Players can chop down trees. You can win a campaign. It feels more like you’re playing a season of Game of Thrones. I mean, that’s a lot, right?”
The hunger brings a dynamic to the game: Even within the individual sections, there is a dynamic in Crowfall. The “Hunger”, the seasons, and even day and night have a constant impact on the world.
Coleman: “As we have the day-night cycles set up at the moment, every night there’s a chance that the infection will take over part of the game. It randomly appears and then spreads. When the Hunger takes over an area, it essentially transforms the world around it into winter. Harvestable resources in that area are no longer available. You go there, and they are frozen.”
Coleman continued: “If you want to gather in an area, you have to destroy the Hunger first. The Hunger gets worse over the course of the campaign – it spreads. The idea is to make the world appear more and more desolate and resources become scarcer as winter approaches.”
Whether Crowfall will succeed with its completely different approach to the MMORPG genre will be revealed at the latest with the delayed release in 2019.
