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[Column] Crowfall: Examining The Hunger
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
What is the end game? This is the quintessential question in the making and maintaining the average Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game. How will it keep players engaged when they hit level cap while the developers furiously work on the next major patch that will expand or change the static world.
Read more of Franklin Rinaldi's Crowfall: Examining The Hunger.
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TLDR; world resets every now and then and the whole impact players made on it is gone...sounds awful. It makes team effort meaningless. Hope I'm wrong, but...yeah...WTB shadowbane 2...srsly...
Think of it as a really large/long real time strategy campaign. As the campaign progresses.. the campaign rules for the world change and get progressively more difficult and challenging. Toward the end of the campaign.. it is basically a free for all. The game worlds are procedurally generated so when a new campaign kicks off.. the resource placements are completely different. I believe there is a fog of war.. so you need to go out to explore and uncover resources on the map. There is one world that persistant and does not reset. This is kind of like your homebase between campaigns. Your character persists obviously. Resources won during the campaign allow you to craft better gear and facilities.
And.. the world is made of voxels. Players can completely change the landscape of the world. Similar to what Landmark and EQN is doing.
I like that the worlds reset. Your character still keeps advancing and you get to hop into a new world with a better character after each campaign and possibly have a bigger impact in that world. I don't know if any other mmos do that.. but I like the idea.
Already starting to sound like a game that we've all played and stopped playing before... events on timers are only fun the first time around... they get boring because they are scripted. If I can take over this town, it should remain mine until someone takes it from me, not because the event has ended. I have impacted the world... perhaps even in a permanent sense. That's what a sandbox is... a world that changes permanently based on player interaction, not some developers script. If that means world domination on one server or a democracy on another, so be it. The worlds were molded by the players... all the developers give us is the clay, the rest is up to us.
According to J. Todd Coleman, you won't see a Shadowbane 2 because of the reasons Shadowbane 1 failed in the first place: a world that was eventually dominated by the most powerful and no way for new players to have a chance. The bleeding of new players made the game unsustainable, financially. He also noted that during the beta of Shadowbane that players would all flock right after game wipes and that it's highest concurrency were during these times. Crowfall will basically build this into the core game. Now, your concern is justified: if worlds reset, is it all meaningless? I don't think it will be meaningless because there are specific win conditions - you won - you'll know you've won and others will know you've won. That's pretty meaningful if you ask me.
Controlling the resources allows you to build and craft more. Crafters will need these resources to craft weapons, armor, siege equipment, etc. This game has a "win" condition.. like a RTS. And in RTS games.. he who controls the most resources tends to win. I don't know what the win condition will be.. but controlling resources will be pivotal to your side's success. Additionally... when the campaign ends.. you are awarded resources that are needed for crafting certain gear and buildings in your home world. Your home world does not reset.
I agree with you on public events.. but I don't think that's what this is. This isn't an event either.. it's a campaign. I don't think there is a timer in the sense that after 3 hours this will happen.. after 24 hours this will happen. The devs stated that campaigns may last a few weeks.. a few months or even up to a year. That's not really scripted. I'm not sure what the conditions are that need to be met to advance the campaign.
The reset needs to be there. I don't want to play in a virtual world where a bunch of kids can sculpt a giant penis building that is there permanently. That's ridiculous and lame... but you know it will happen.
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I'm rapidly approaching the "too much talk" point. Show me something. If you have nothing sthu and start building.
It seems this is a build up to sell a low feature, high concept alpha early access. I hope I'm wrong. With all this talk I hope they can atleast deliver a feature complete beta.
We'll know in 4 days.
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Wow... Someone doesn't like reading about mmo's.
Okay then
I'm a gamer and I play games, not virtual vending machines.
A lot of hype and coverage lately.
Guess we will find out in 20 whatever.
I just don't understand why this is hard. You resolve the end game issue but eliminating the end game. Simple.
This is one thing old school vanilla EQ had right. Leveling needs to be a process that takes times and the reward needs to be the journey, not the destination. Reaching max level should be a major accomplishment taking months, if not years, not something that just happens in a few weeks.
I played EQ for something like 2-3 years and I can honestly say that there were probably at least a dozen zones or more that I had never once stepped foot in. Also even at max level, I had 100s of AA points I could acquire to keep leveling my character slowly while I adventuring and working to get into a position where I could move on to another zone or take on another adventure. It was for all intents and purpses an EVER QUEST, something that never ended, that had no stupid term like ENDGAME. Endgame came about because WoW had such a rapid leveling curve that player found themselves with nothing to do and Blizzard had to scramble to find something, anything to keep players in the game. Honestly, WoWs ENDGAME is the worst thing that ever happened to MMOs.
thank you...just,thank you!
Reading only goes so far. Anybody can sit down and give an interview or write a few paragraphs on all the awesome features their MMO will have. Fact of the matter is, very few developers who have talked a good game in the last decade actually had something to show.
Crowfall has been all talk and hype. They either need to show something or, as previously stated, STFU and start working on the damn game.
Until they show something, this very well could be Kingdoms of Amalur all over again.
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I agree that there is too damn much information about games that aren't even close to release. It's a non-stop advertisement if you ask me. Just look at this site, 90% of the content is about "Give us money and we might make your game" crap. How about we do a 180 here and limit all discussion to games due to actually release in the next 6 months?
Oh, that's right... we'd have nothing new to discuss at all then.
Anybody who thought otherwise, was not thinking it through.
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