ArtCraft Creative Director J. Todd Coleman and Design Director Thomas Blair are back on YouTube answering Crowfall questions from high-end backers and players this week. The duo tell testers about the visibility of buff and debuff effects, class and discipline changes, character naming, logout timers, ability cap tweaks, anonymous characters, death penalty, crafting recipes, the Dregs, longer campaigns, Frostweavers, and the vision for the game’s procedural dynamic generation.
Notably, there’s a really great question in there about siege battles too – what’s Crowfall’s plan for dealing with a scenario where one side gets so powerful that the other sides just give up and quit? Right now, Coleman says, there are point multipliers on captures by the underdog sides, and mathematically it works, but that’s not enough.
“What I really want is some different vectors that you can use to catch up as opposed to just the exact same one – so other activities that I could do to generate points,” he says. “In a game like Catan [or] Tropico or something like that, it might be whoever built the longest road at the end of the game gets extra points, whoever amassed the most science cards would get bonus points, so other kinds of non-linear objectives would be really helpful.”
Coleman also points out that the game will need to communicate the possibility of victory to underdogs too, otherwise players who think they’re losing and have no chance to come back – when they do – just won’t even log in. There’s the challenge.
In other Crowfall news today, ArtCraft announced that it has reacquired publishing rights for Europe, the Middle East, and Brazil from its now-former partner at Travian Games.
“We have an update for you on our Crowfall licensing. While we aren’t going to dive into the details, we wanted to let you know that Travian Games (“TG”) and ArtCraft Entertainment (“ACE”) have mutually agreed to end our existing publishing partnership and that ArtCraft is, as of June 13, 2019, resuming direct responsibility for all Crowfall customers in the Travian Games publishing territories (which include Europe, the Middle East and Brazil).”
The Travian partnership was originally announced back in 2016.
