Crowfall Gets More Than Half Of Its Kickstarter Goal In One Day
It looks like a new Kickstarter frenzy is in place. After a fairly long drought, many new interesting projects have arisen in the last few months; we’ve told you all about Into the Stars and Underworld Ascendant in our exclusive interviews, and we’ve also reported on Edge of Eternity.
However, Crowfall managed to soar above all these in terms of total funding in a single day within the launch of its campaign, which has already received more than $550K in pledges (well beyond 60% of the minimum funding, set at $800K).
In case you’re not familiar with Crowfall, it’s a new take on sandbox MMORPGs mixed with elements from strategy games. The developer, Artcraft Entertainment, is led by veterans of the MMO industry such as J Todd Coleman (Shadowbane, Wizard101, Pirate101) and Gordon Walton (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and Star Wars: The Old Republic). The team has been slowly hyping the game with reveals over the course of the last month, and the tactics seems to have paid dividends.
The basic concept of Crowfall can be summed with the sentence Eternal Heroes, Dying Worlds. What this means in practice is that players use persistent characters that travel on Campaign Worlds to establish their domination (the project was named Play2Crush after all, and PvP is the main focus). These worlds are however doomed to be temporary (the lore explains this with a force called Hunger which ultimately corrupts all worlds), which is essential as it means that there are actual victories at some point, instead of an endless tug-of-war; Campaign Worlds will have different rulesets, some harsher than others, and may last for different periods of time (one to three months, typically).
Once the Campaign is over, players will be able to take back whatever spoils they were able to gather to the Eternal Kingdoms. These worlds are permanent, player owned and managed and yet they are devoid of resources, which is why going into Campaigns will be critical. Each player will be a Monarch in its own Eternal Kingdom and there will be an actual fealty system with vassals for those who looking to expand; the team is also working on a design that will let you wage war on another player’s Kingdom, but this will still be secondary to the Campaigns.
Being able to “reset the table” like in a strategy game also carries other benefits. Unlike most MMORPGs, Crowfall will allow you to destroy the world freely thanks to Voxelfarm, a technology allowing similar results to Minecraft (without the blocky aesthetics, thankfully); imagine sieges where you can blast your enemy’s wall in real time or just dig a tunnel underneath, for example. Voxelfarm will also allow Artcraft to procedurally generated Campaign Worlds, so that each new start is completely fresh, as befitting of a new world.
Needless to say, Crowfall shows extreme promise even at this early stage. It’s currently scheduled to be available in late 2016 on PC, but stay tuned as we’ll probably have a lot more information to share very soon!