Yesterday, ArtCraft posted a live Crowfall Q&A video showing off what the devs are calling “action harvesting” – and it caused a surprising amount of uproar in our comments. Essentially, the game will simply put players into a harvesting mode with a special skill bar. Instead of clicking, grabbing, and darting off, you’ll be finger-dancing skills on the node.
Incidentally, it’ll also leave you exposed to enemy attack, but the chief complaint was actually that it’ll be a boring timewaster, the sort of things other MMOs have tried in crafting and rejected because they’re fun a few times and then, a chore.
Today, the studio’s gone into more depth on the system, explaining that the changes “mesh” with the game’s action combat and were actually inspired by the game’s ongoing power tray redesign as the devs played around with trying to build harvesting that wasn’t just a click to get stuff.
“Not only did [the survival tray version] of the prototype work, it was waaay more fun to run around and harvest,” Design Lead Thomas “Blixtev” Blair explains. “The animators enhanced it even more with some flourish animations to break up the visual pacing. Enabling the fly text that was shut-off by default made it feel even better since fly-text not only gives valuable feedback to the player as to how much damage their current tool is doing vs the current resource node, but it also creates a nice sense of progression as you get better at Harvesting (and it creates some visual eye candy!)”
It’s not done yet, he notes, and the team is still retesting player behavior with the new system, but in the interim, it’s “a much stronger foundation to work from.”
