f13.net forums - Crowfall aka Play2Crush aka Shadowbane II aka Nostalgia Online

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December 22, 2024, 12:20:38 AM

we're back, baby

Except combat wasn't fun in Darkfall either. Like, at all.

It was fast paced, kinda quake-like speed, but it was solid.

Darkfall combat was not quake-like. I didn't even think it was terrible, but quake movement and combat is pretty much the best ever done and Darkfall combat doesn't deserve to be compared to it.

Exactly. To me Darkfall combat was goofy and unfun. It was nice to finally have a game where you had to aim and feel more immersed than in another generic tab-targeted combat, but it was stiff as a board and and awkwardly inaccurate, which is the opposite of Quake. I wish it were like Quake, trust me the game would have been ten times more popular if it happened to be like Quake.

You could say Darkfall is a good example of a game where the ideas for that target niche audience are there, but execution is so generally mediocre that even the most die-hard eventually leave to something more pleasant to play. Ten to twenty years ago things were different, but now you need all your components to be compelling otherwise people just quit and go play Marvel Superheroes or Quake even though, on paper, they are supposed to prefer Darkfall or Shadowbane. They know this very well at ArtCraft, and that's why they have been talking so much about a compelling and fun combat for Crowfall since day one.

Quote from: Speedy Cerviche on February 10, 2016, 09:05:54 AM

They should license the Darkfall engine, it actually was fantastic.

Are we so old and lazy that we let shit like this slide?! The engine wasn't fantastic. The engine you saw while attempting to play Shadowbane was the windows desktop. Because the fucking thing crashed every 5 minutes.

edit: Darkfall? Shadowbane? Speaking of old. I see red thinking about either game and how close to great they were.

I don't think Darkfall was ever close to great…

I don't think enough people here actually played the game to know one way or another :P

You would think those commenting on it did it though.

I played a lot of it, I thought the combat was excellent for a MMORPG (Obviously not as good as a top notch action game like Quake or M&B). Could support hundreds of players in a small area, the physics were a lot of fun although could have used tweaking for balance of certain aspects of combat. The biggest problems were the grind and lack of RPG content updates because the owners were broke, so it just became some pointless lower quality arena game on a low populated RPG world sized map and with a heavy mandatory grind to wall off new participants.

That was my overall impression of Darkfall. It also doesn't sound the slightest bit fun. Well, until you hit max, and then can PvP on par with everyone else.

Darkfall was about 5% interesting/compelling moments and 95% janky grind and/or auto-swimming into a wall to build you strength stat (or whatever it was).

The trailer is beyond horrible, it is one of the worst I've ever seen. How on Earth can you have choppy framerate in a fucking trailer? How is this even possible? The game is NOT that choppy on my computer. How can ANYONE ever release a trailer with bad framerate? I think the only time I've seen something so bad was when McQuaid showcased Vanguard more than 10 years ago (by the way, a game that was a least technically ambitious, something that Crowfall is not at all), and it still had better framerate than this. Pre-alpha, yadda yadda, but this is just impossible to comprehend for me. I am in the pre-alpha, and the game is *as of now* as bad as it looks in that trailer. The only difference? The framerate is a bit better. So what the hell? Who in their ~~right~~ OK mind would release a trailer with huge framerate issues for a game that is starving for money?

Even if the trailer was super smooth... There is 37 pages about a game which looks like created by some forum friends and noone will say to them that it's complete crap and they should drop it.

Getting a Dark Age of Camelot vibe from that video.

The frame rate is consistently bad throughout the video, though. Each scene had almost identical timing on the lost frames. I almost suspect it was someone with no idea what they were doing in AE when they exported the video.

That said, wow it was badly produced. The MW vids are better than that and those suck. There was the intro sentence, and the outtro sentence and that was it for story. You couldn't tell what teams were there, a lot of bad shots of catapults and jumbling gameplay follows of multiple characters that you flipped between faster than a Michael Bay Shaky-cam fight. It was more of a terribly-composed gameplay video than a trailer.

I have a fairly positive outlook for this game, specially with how much progress they have made in the single year since the KS ended, but this is a bad video that doesn't help them at all. The sad thing is they hired a guy specifically to make videos.

Holy shit, there is no excuse for releasing a video that looks that bad.

That looked like someone's shitty kickstart proof of concept video.

That video is shit; poorly edited and bad framerate.

I didn't think the video was that horrible. Just really badly edited. I didn't notice the framerate stuff yall mentioned as much.

It is not as good as their previous videos. It is actually not as good as playing the game even.

It looked like it was intended for a loop at a trade show rather than an actual trailer. Why it seems to be running at 12 fps, I have no idea.

--Dave

Surprising no one, "some features" now delayed to 2017. There will be a "soft launch" of "something" in 2016.

That seems to me to be the worst of all possible worlds. Don't push out something halfway between an MMO and a lobby session siege game and expect the full audience to be there when it becomes an MMO.

We hoped. We failed. We are idiots (well, the usual ones among us who did). Sounds to me like Crowfall is done.

EDIT: The official statement:

Quote

The Good

Overall, we think momentum on the game has been extraordinary. For a team of ~20 people, we have absolutely flown through our development plan.

It has been barely over a year since we ended our Kickstarter, and we already have a playable game with multiple game modes – which we consistently test on servers all around the world.
We have a strong foundation for a number of core systems: patching, login, character creation, melee and ranged combat, skill training, siege engines, items & equipment… and a bunch of back-end stuff that you guys don’t know about. Some of these still need a fair amount of iteration – but the foundation of the game is getting better with every release.
We successfully delivered a server-side physics system, one of the cornerstones of our vision. Players can destroy castles and topple walls in real-time -- one of the most challenging (and unique) problems that we set out to solve.
We have core functionality for five of our 13 planned archetypes. Thanks to feature reuse, our velocity for creating new archetypes is also increasing.

The Bad

We still have a lot of work to do, and the clock is ticking.

We need a TON of optimization (both server and client). We’re topping out our matches at just under 100 players… a solid start, but it needs to go up a LOT (and it will, soon!)
Our worlds are still very tiny. We need to increase the size of each world by more than an order of magnitude.
Our procedural world system isn’t done yet, and we can’t start to build “real” worlds until this system is functional.
We have a mountain of content to create (characters, monsters, buildings, equipment, materials, mounts, etc.)

The Ugly

Back in December, we made a decision to push out our “Siege” milestone so that we could spend more time working on combat and movement. It was the right call: combat feels a LOT better. The fallout, though, was a delay in Siege Perilous – a one-month push from March to April.

The truth is that we are still not there yet. Combat is better, but it needs to be GREAT. Movement is better, but it needs to FLOW. Castle destruction is cool, but it needs to be AMAZING.

Nothing is free. Once again, we are faced with a choice:

We can call these systems ‘good enough’ and move on, to do our best to make our original date(s), OR...
We can continue to work on the foundation of the core game experience, knowing that the schedule won’t be able to absorb it. The impact of continuing to polish these systems, of continuing to strengthen the foundation of the game, is going to push some features into 2017.
In our mind, this isn’t really a choice. Our ultimate goal is to make the best game possible, a game that we (and you) will play for years and years.

If we have to choose between hitting a date and making a great game, we will choose the latter, EVERY TIME. We can’t shortcut polish. We can’t just say it’s good enough and move on. That’s not why we started this company.

And yes, we know that this isn’t easy on our community. While we are confident that spending more time on polish Is the right answer, we hate having to ask you to be patient. To complicate matters, we don’t know exactly what will be delayed (or for how long) because we don’t know how long we’re going to need to spend on these core systems. Polishing something until it’s right isn’t something you can easily predict.

Hate it or not, we’re going to do it because it’s the right way to make a great game.

So, what does this mean?

There is really only one way to deal with uncertainty. We are going to take as long as it takes, but instead of shooting for a single launch date (and delaying that day until we complete ALL planned features and content), we are aiming for a soft launch to get you in, and playing, as quickly as possible.

Our priorities are to…

To build you a playable game experience,
To turn on character persistence with the expectation of never wiping again as soon as we feel like the systems are solid enough to do so,
To prioritize the features that are central to the heart of our vision first, and
To treat the game as a live service, adding features and content incrementally over time
…and, most importantly:

Continue to polish the core systems until we get them right.

Given the state of their current alpha there is no way they could release a polished version of the game in 2016 regardless of how many systems they put on delay.

So long as the delay doesn't mean they run out of money, I don't see how this is a bad thing. Putting more players in and "soft launching" seems to be the thing to do nowadays.

Quote from: HaemishM on May 12, 2016, 07:39:59 AM

So long as the delay doesn't mean they run out of money, I don't see how this is a bad thing. Putting more players in and "soft launching" seems to be the thing to do nowadays.

I honestly didn't expect them to put anything out until 2018, on a 3 year development schedule. The fact they are as far along as they are is impressive to me. And yes, if they have the cash to keep it going, I couldn't care less if it takes 3 years or less.

Quote from: Falconeer on May 12, 2016, 01:24:50 AM

We hoped. We failed. We are idiots (well, the usual ones among us who did). Sounds to me like Crowfall is done.

Not able to hit their highly optimistic release date = done? IMO they are way ahead of where i thought they would be, if you really pledged money believing an MMO could be built from scratch in 2 years for single digit millions the idiot part might be accurate though.

Quote from: Threash on May 12, 2016, 12:08:35 PM

IMO they are way ahead of where i thought they would be, if you really pledged money believing an MMO could be built from scratch in 2 years for single digit millions the idiot part might be accurate though.

Seconded. I had disregarded Crowfall as a ridiculous pipe dream by people who should have known better. That they are genuinely putting their hearts and souls into this and have produced something that isn't a laughable shit show is... laudable. I'm willing to believe this thing may make a few people happy yet.

Quote from: Falconeer on May 12, 2016, 01:24:50 AM

We hoped. We failed. We are idiots (well, the usual ones among us who did). Sounds to me like Crowfall is done.

"We" didn't do any of that. "We" said the particular team they assembled could do nothing but fail.

<insert GWB mission accomplished image here>

Sounds like another indie MMO that's going for a "Minimal Viable Product aka MVP" type of deal. It didn't work out so well for Pathfinder Online. I wonder if any of the subscriber time backers get starts with the "soft launch" or a later date when more features are added?

Honestly I don't care about the delay. I am not in a hurry and I resized my "hopes" the moment I got access to alpha months ago. I gave them some money but that's because I have a problem with money. No, it's not the delay that makes me think this is somewhat doomed (and obviously, I hope to be wrong). It's what I am seeing so far: it feels uninspired, confused, and doesn't give away any particular hint of talent at any level. That recent trailer explains my point better than my words I think.

And "we", as I said, doesn't stand for f13, it stands for the few curious fools around here who gave them more than zero dollars.

The statement is all about their determination to produce a polished, finished game but their solution appears to be to release an unfinished, unpolished game and continue working on it.

But won't this damage the game's reputation for good? If they have a bad release now, players aren't going to be interested when they finally have an AAA game in two years time (assuming this happens), are they?

Quote from: palmer_eldritch on May 13, 2016, 04:19:16 AM

But won't this damage the game's reputation for good? If they have a bad release now, players aren't going to be interested when they finally have an AAA game in two years time (assuming this happens), are they?

Seems to be the case a lot, yeah. What I've heard about Early Access (on Steam at least) is not generally positive.

If a developer expects, say, 100 sales if their game launched in the conventional manner, they might instead launch it on EA and expect that 25 people will buy it early, and then when it launches "for real" they'll get the other 75. But what usually happens is that they get those 25 people and then those 25 people post reviews and feedback and Youtube videos of the game in it's unfinished state and those 75 other people either trickle in slowly over the course of the beta or stop being interested in the game, so there is no big "real launch" sales boost. Just the same big spike at the original release tapering off to a long tail as new gamers trickle in over time. Except instead of the initial spike being 100 people tall, it's 25 people tall, and the tail is shorter because your word of mouth is lousy, due to the number of people talking about the game being way lower AND the game they're talking about being an unfinished beta title rather than a polished product.

And it's even worse for multiplayer games which rely on a large community to be playable.