Crowfall aka Play2Crush aka Shadowbane II aka Nostalgia Online

[Falconeer]

So updated for 2015:

Hate it and predict failure.
Make a 30 page thread about how stupid it looks.
Pledge money, more or less secretely.
Have people sign up for the beta to mock it.
Keep the hate flowing.
Watch the fallout at release.

Fixed it for you.

[Triforcer]

I will admit it when I donate- you are talking to someone who bought ESO collectors edition here 

[Falconeer]

Oh I am voting with my money. I want more of these games, I am totally pledging.

[WayAbvPar]

I am going to kick the shit out of this football this time. I swear.

[Draegan]

I don't think there's enough to make the game viable, but there are certainly enough for popcorn.

They're just not here. Everyone here knows better.

Oh there is a solid 100-300k people out there that would gladly play a game like this assuming the game isn't a piece of shit. More if the game is actually good. None of these games are ever really good though.

[sam, an eggplant]

You never know, this could be wildly popular. Maybe Shadowbane was just way ahead of its time and meaningful PvP plus a soupçon of SWG crafting equals the next League of Legends. Doubtful, but not a zero chance.

[Falconeer]

I am going to kick the shit out of this football this time. I swear.

There hasn't been that many footballs for this Charlie Brown to kick though in the last ten years.

Cynicism is necessary, and yes this game will probably fail spectacularly because it's so much easier to fail than to succeed in this industry that even statistics is against it. But how many games of this kind have been attempted since 2003?

[WayAbvPar]

The key is to make the non-PVP stuff interesting and rewarding. A robust economy coupled with a large explorable world that has room for player housing, guild bases, etc. Make the PvE combat interesting/profitable enough to keep people wanting to do it even with the threat of PvP interference. Make the world large enough (and good spawns random enough) that the best PvE spots can't all be camped to death by the PvP crowd. Randomize loot so that even low or mid-level mobs can drop something amazing (but the high level mobs drop it more often).

Make loot available/trivial to lose. I would love to see a combo of UO-style crafting along with Shadowbane's merchants you could install in your city who would spawn random magic items in their inventory. Make the mobs drop decent, usable loot as well. I like seeing people with a mishmash of high level crafted goodies and some mob only drops. Make that shit random though- none of this you must kill foozle X in order to get drop Y that is essential for class Z' nonsense.

[Draegan]

Well the fact there is no levels just skill based advancement is a good sign this isn't just going to be one other game like the rest. The trick is what activities are devs asking a player to do on any given day to get those skill advanced.

[Falconeer]

You never know, this could be wildly popular. Maybe Shadowbane was just way ahead of its time and meaningful PvP plus a soupçon of SWG crafting equals the next League of Legends. Doubtful, but not a zero chance.

And Shadowbane wasn't ahead of its time, it was BROKEN and plagued by click to move which everyone hated at the time. By the time it had resolved its issues no one even cared anymore and even now people only remember SB-exe even though it got rid of it at some point and became pretty cool, except too late. Shadowbane had lots of great unique stuff. Buried under critical technical deficiencies and horrible visuals.

[tazelbain]

I am going to kick the shit out of this football this time. I swear.

There hasn't been that many footballs for this Charlie Brown to kick though in the last ten years.

Cynicism is necessary, and yes this game will probably fail spectacularly because it's so much easier to fail than to succeed in this industry that even statistics is against it. But how many games of this kind have been attempted since 2003?

Doesn't really matter now, doesn't it, because these guys are designing like it is 1999.

[WayAbvPar]

A lot of cool stuff they wanted to do in 1999 might be feasible now with hardware and software advances. Hollywood as been telling the same stories for 100+ years and are making more money than ever.

[tazelbain]

Shadowbane didn't just have technical failures, it had human nature failures. Human nature hasn't changed.  People don't pay to be victimized. When it takes 5 hours to destroy 5 weeks of work, people find something to do with their time. If given a chance to ruin other people fun, they will do so with glee. No polygon counts, no cloud computing, no broadband modem changes that. How people really play (not how idealist designers imagine they should) has to be accounted for or you are just retreading doomed history.

[sam, an eggplant]

Yeah, SB obviously had technical problems, but I really don't see why that's pertinent to this discussion about an entirely new game.

There are various ways to attack the sheep vs. wolves problem. I posted one earlier in this thread.

[Goreschach]

Seriously? Are we seriously going to do this again?

[Malakili]

If we didn't keep doing stuff like this I would have quit these forums a long time ago. 

[WayAbvPar]

Seriously? Are we seriously going to do this again?

You are under no obligation to participate, or even to read.

[schild]

A lot of cool stuff they wanted to do in 1999 might be feasible now with hardware and software advances. Hollywood as been telling the same stories for 100+ years and are making more money than ever.

This is a flawed argument without context. There are more Uwe Bolls (let's say an even 100) in MMORPGs than there are Kubricks (let's be generous and say 0).

[Falconeer]

Shadowbane didn't just have technical failures, it had human nature failures. Human nature hasn't changed.  People don't pay to be victimized. When it takes 5 hours to destroy 5 weeks of work, people find something to do with their time. If given a chance to ruin other people fun, they will do so with glee. No polygon counts, no cloud computing, no broadband modem changes that. How people really play (not how idealist designers imagine they should) has to be accounted for or you are just retreading doomed history.

 

How can you and some other keep posting these things over and over again, in every single thread that barely mention open world PvP with lootable bodies, without getting bored of yourself and your own fingertips hitting the same keys? I guess you like it that way. The reality, as pointed out a million times, is that there haven't been many games of this kind to begin with, so all the "evidence" of failure is based on a handful (literally) of products that are either still alive, or crumbled under the weight of technical incompetence. The few that existed had a small but dedicated audience which means they could be viable as long as they are not going to be technically terrible and they won't have spent more than it makes sense to spend for a nice game. Some of the examples you make are also silly because EVE proved them wrong and because it doesn't take genius coding or design to modify things so that it doesn't take 5 hours to take down a building that took 5 weeks to build, something even the late Shadowbane changed.

How many times more are you and some other gonna post "WOLVES AND SHEEPS BLARH BLARH" only to get (and ignore) the usual reply mentioning a smaller but dedicated audience, not having to go for WoW numbers, previous examples being games from a technically impaired era, and Gamer Human Nature having been changed in recent times by survival games that unexpectedly sold millions of copies?

Why is it so hard to accept that there's a lot of people, clearly not you and that's fine, who do not quit a game when their city gets destroyed or their Alliance gets robbed? Does it threaten you as a gamer to understand that there are alternative niche markets for alternative niche tastes where the article you are bashing is actually in high demand, and all those people are asking is for it to not be made by talentless fucks?

I know it's useless, and #BUTWOLVES is a favourite hashtag around here that will keep recurring on f13 every three posts for the rest of eternity, but it wouldn't be so terrible if sometimes you could come up with something a little more original than just jumping into a thread about a game that doesn't interest you only to repeat for the millionth time "Since this game is not for me, it can only be terribad."

Now, if you want to take from this that I said "Oh Crowfall is gonna be awesome!", go ahead. But it's not what I think. I believe there's a huge amounf of ways it can tank even before it launches. But I also think that there's room for a kind of games that haven't been made for a long time because WoW hijacked the market and sealed it for a decade. I think it's time to try and see if, with lots of lessons learned from other games, improved and cheaper technologies, and a slightly different pool of players, a decently made game of this kind can make a small profit and a few players (not you) happy.

Yeah, SB obviously had technical problems, but I really don't see why that's pertinent to this discussion about an entirely new game.

Because I believe that the technical shortcomings of Shadowbane played a bigger part in its demise than the hardcore PvP design, while many seem to think it was because of the design HENCE Crowfall can only follow the same suit.

[sam, an eggplant]

A lot of cool stuff they wanted to do in 1999 might be feasible now with hardware and software advances.

That's an interesting discussion on its own, when you think about it-- what could 15 years of technological advancement do for multiplayer games?

First thing to come to mind is that low-latency high-bandwidth connections from pervasive broadband allows for "twitch" gameplay and streaming content.

Virtualization on very inexpensive commodity hardware allows for tons of instancing/phasing. You don't need to rely on an expensive largely vertically scaled oracle RAC install for your backend, you can distribute it.

Assuming no SSDs, as they are still at a premium, commodity hardware tends to bottleneck on I/O. This leaves tons of free CPU cycles. They can be spent to model complex AI behavior, which enables all kinds of cool emergent (and probably broken, at first anyway) gameplay.

Smartphones and tablets offer tons of opportunities for second-screen UIs. Maps, chat, inventories, minigames, etc.

Any I missed?

[Typhon]

I run through a quick checklist that games like this need to address for me to put up with the play2crush jagoffs;

• Combat is fun - this seems hard
• Combat is often - don't make me run around for hours at a time for 30 seconds of combat
• Combat is for something - simplest example is a land grab
• The rich don't just keep getting richer - Shadowbane was probably the most egregious of this, but DaoC had it's fair share as well.  EVE's answer of making the game world simply too large for any one organization to own it all seems to work, but an extremely large world seems like a poor place to have lots of combat.
• Game imbalances are accounted for - biggest consistent failure here is population imbalance.  The population is not, and has never been, self-balancing.

Raph's one-off, "make it harder for the winner to keep winning", maybe addresses bullet four but we only heard that one-off, so it's impossible to tell what he was actually talking about.
The whole, "go to whatever world you want" thing, if I'm naively generous, maybe addresses population imbalance.

So actually they are off to a good start, compared to other games designed in 1999.   

If they hit bullets 1-3 you'll we'll all be playing... and then bitching about other stuff one month in.  If they don't the game will suck and it will have little to do with play2crush.

[tazelbain]

How can you and some other keep posting these things over and over again, in every single thread that barely mention open world PvP with lootable bodies, without getting bored of yourself and your own fingertips hitting the same keys? I guess you like it that way.

Because I want to see advances in this area. Any game designs that allow the playerbase to cannibalize itself without any attempt at migrating isn't advancing anything.

[Draegan]

How can you and some other keep posting these things over and over again, in every single thread that barely mention open world PvP with lootable bodies, without getting bored of yourself and your own fingertips hitting the same keys? I guess you like it that way.

Because I want to see advances in this area. Any game designs that allow the playerbase to cannibalize itself without any attempt at migrating isn't advancing anything.

Well isn't that difference between good design and bad design? Your arguement has nothing to do with PVP games.

[tazelbain]

How can you and some other keep posting these things over and over again, in every single thread that barely mention open world PvP with lootable bodies, without getting bored of yourself and your own fingertips hitting the same keys? I guess you like it that way.

Because I want to see advances in this area. Any game designs that allow the playerbase to cannibalize itself without any attempt at migrating isn't advancing anything.

Well isn't that difference between good design and bad design? Your arguement has nothing to do with PVP games.

More like, acknowledge a systemic problem and design a way to deal with it versus pretend its not a problem.

[Lightstalker]

SB started with nothing for a guild to do *but* annihilate the opposition.  Every incidental misunderstanding between any two chump players could escalate into a desperate struggle for survival where if you lost your guild was disbanded, your communication channel was broken, and your players were scattered to the ruins all over the map often with no route "home."  This naturally led to losers quitting or joining the "winners" and the system was fine with that because eventually infighting would break up the winners.  While the infighting was dead-on for human nature it wasn't particularly fun to experience and led to even more quitting as folks got frustrated with the backbiting and betrayal.  Attrition being a core challenge to the entire revenue model.

Eventually Mines were added to provide something short of total annihilation to fight over.  These of course helped reinforce the strong getting stronger dynamic because those mines provided resources needed to do the 'best' things.  Many guilds just treated them as casis belli for total annihilation and the doom-loop continued. 

So, even when in the past they recognized a problematic dynamic they have a track record of implementing a fix with undesirable consequences.  Raph's off the cuff remark doesn't fully capture the dynamic:  it shouldn't just be harder to keep winning, it should be harder to hold onto what you've already got by yourself without any enemy interaction the more you've won.  Overall the "infighting and human nature will fix it" strategy was just too un-fun and indirect for *a game* (not to mention hard on your revenue stream).  Though it did work as intended and showed a clear understanding of human nature in online games.

[sam, an eggplant]

I don't play EVE, how do they address that problem? My understanding is that it's the wild west.

[Triforcer]

I don't play EVE, how do they address that problem? My understanding is that it's the wild west.

I believe spies join the megaguild, become officers, and then loot its bank and involuntarily disband it.  Maybe devs can do that periodically.

[Hutch]

I don't play EVE, how do they address that problem? My understanding is that it's the wild west.

I believe spies join the megaguild, become officers, and then loot its bank and involuntarily disband it.  Maybe devs can do that periodically.

Now I want to play Crowfall 

[murdoc]

I'll totally try this out. This has me more interested than Wildstar or ESO ever did.

[Falconeer]

News!

They revealed a new class, the Forgemaster.




Then, some more info on Combat and Economy.

COMBAT:

- Combat will NOT be tab-target, it will be more action oriented than a standard MMORPG and will have active dodge (dashes).
- They are also moving away from the Holy Trinity and said that it's going to be "purposefully light on in-combat healing, to make it more deadly."
- Each archetype starts with pre-disposition towards a certain playstyle, but after that, the game system really opens up and allows you to adapt your character any way you like.
- The game will not have PvE raids. "Crowfall is a game is about territorial conquest and a player-driven economy – not PvE raids."
- There will not be "bosses" as we know them. "We have creatures that are incredibly deadly, but they don’t hang out at the end of a dungeon waiting for you to come kill them.  They also don’t drop rare magic items when defeated – because that would undercut the player-driven economy. Instead, they sometimes drop rare reagents, which a master crafter can use as additives to craft high-end equipment."


ECONOMY:

- There will be two different kinds of crafting resources. Those used for personal crafting (Resources and those used in conquest (Materials). This is actualy closer to the Archeage system than it sounds on paper.
- Resources can be harvested from the environment, and sometimes found on certain monsters.  Materials come from particular types of POIs (Points of Interest) called resource factories: Quarries, Lumber Mills, and Mines.
- Points of Interests, which tend to produce Materials and looks like will be conquerable, can yield different grade and qualities of the same Materials. One mine could produce high quality iron, while another produces low quality copper -- but at a much higher rate.
- Quarries located in a remote area will typically produce much more materials (and at a greater frequency.)  This was designed so that, as the risk of transporting those materials goes up, so does the potential reward. 

Here's a concept picture for the Resource Map. Doesn't look that revolutionary but it's cute.

[Hutch]

Public Forum Link

In addition to Falc's excerpts, they are planning to have different PvP rulesets depending on which "world" you're in.

If they're really not going to have FFA PvP everywhere, this game might have room for sheep after all. Bravo!

[Falconeer]

Two more pictures, giving a sneek peek about the way servers will be different from each other, with different maps and different rulesets, so different objectives. Interestng aspect is that players are supposed to be able to travel between servers/worlds.

Import and Export rules?!?

[Nija]

Why wouldn't you want things like dungeons and valleys containing elite mobs in your land conquest game?

What's the purpose of holding the land if there isn't anything to do with it other than fight over it? What's the purpose of the fighting? C'mon. Not this bullshit again.

[Falconeer]

Q: Do you have boss monsters?

A: Sort of.  Not exactly.
We have creatures that are incredibly deadly, but they don’t hang out at the end of a dungeon waiting for you to come kill them.  They also don’t drop rare magic items when defeated – because that would undercut the player-driven economy.
Instead, they sometimes drop rare reagents, which a master crafter can use as additives to craft high-end equipment.

This addresses that concern a bit.

[shiznitz]

How to solve the problem that it is usually easier to gank someone for their resources than gather your own?