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Crowfall - The Talent System Revealed - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Crowfall - The Talent System Revealed - MMORPG.com
Crowfall keeps on building towards what will undeniably be one of the most unique MMORPGs in recent memory. Everything the team at ArtCraft seems to do is just a little or a lot different from the norm. And the same goes for how the team approaches their talent system for player characters. We caught up with J. Todd Coleman and Thomas Blair to discuss the newly revealed feature. Plus we have an exclusive look at the video reveal of the system.
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Yes.
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The first test of 5.8 is happening this afternoon. 5.8 will likely spend 2-4 weeks on TEST and then move to the LIVE server.
The next milestone after 5.8 is 6.0, which marks the beginning of Alpha. That is currently targeted for February/March. At that point, the game should be close to if not totally feature complete. Alpha and Beta aren't expected to be overly long, so I think it's a fair assumption to say that the game should be live by this time next year.
If you are interested in playing, you might not want to wait until then though. 5.8 marks the first campaign you can actually win, and learning the game now will benefit you later. The game will be the same price either way.
In regards to the staggered release dates? Honestly, it just feels like they're either re-releasing the information they did last year or trying to 'recreate' systems. I wouldn't be shocked to hear them say they're gonna release a BR mode next year for 'testing.'
We did our BR mode in Crowfall almost 3 years ago called Hungerdome… no doubt we will be launching Q3 or 4 next year.
The race to launch at this point is not vs SC or Ashes... it is and always has been vs CU and NW Players can expect the open Beta by Summer... you have to have registered account before then if you want to try Beta for free.
The talent system is completely new, though it is based on the old idea of promotion classes. Until now though, it was just an idea. This is the first time we are seeing it in game, in any form. Up to this point, it has been assumed that the promotion classes were dropped in favor of disciplines, but now we get both, and the game will be better for it.
Reading in between the lines, I got the impression that the team is happy to release early with basic features. As opposed to reworking all the systems to get everything just right for release.
Combined with the crafting info today... job well done guys.
Beyond my peeves they're doing so much right, and I'm still looking forward to this... but as I've stated previously, 2019 is the last year they are safe from my release skepticism.
I'll be waiting Artcraft....
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A few months before it is ready. They're planning on having a "soft launch" where it's kind of close to ready, then they'll tweak some more things after some players have been coming for the launch, and then they'll have their huge marketing blitz a few months later, once they're satisfied that everything is ready.
When will it be ready? I have no clue.
When Artcraft has to go back in and tweak the game play what happens to the people who spent the time and energy to do the build only to have it nerfed? Deal with it, or start over? The decisions thing works both ways.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is true for most competitive games to a degree. In WoW, you have months where certain classes are considerably weaker than others. In League of Legends, you can have whole years where certain positions are much less impactful. In those cases, players won't necessarily 'retrain' into a different role, but will rather roll with the punches.
How comparable is the Crowfall time investment to let's say a WoW time investment? You could argue that Crowfall takes months, while WoW may take a week to level up to cap. But if you consider actually gearing up your WoW character to be at raid level, perhaps those two games are much more similar?
Account skills are very slow to level and it would take decades to truly max everything, but affect all characters on the account, including new ones that you make after you've leveled a bunch of account skills already.
Character skills are tied to the character, not the account, and level much more quickly. The intent is that being able to drop a previous character and create a new one frequently should be viable.
Talent trees as in this article are a type of character skill. If you decide that a nerf means the character is ruined and you have to start over, it doesn't mean you start over from scratch like you would when creating a level 1 character in most MMORPGs. Your account skills are still there and apply instantly to any brand new character that you make. Furthermore, sacrificing things to level up a new character should make it so that when an established player wants to create a new character, he can make it strong enough to be viable very quickly.
You might think that changes the problem to one of, what about nerfing account skills? But account skills aren't mutually exclusive. If a nerf means that some of the account skills that you've leveled up are weak enough that you wouldn't have leveled them if you had known the nerf was coming, that doesn't mean you have to start over. You can then go level other account skills just as quickly as if you hadn't previously leveled the ones you have. Even if you've maxed some skills that are now useless to you, you're no worse off than if you hadn't acquired those account skills at all and had simply not used the training time it took.
Nor does that necessarily mean that you'll forever be behind players whose account skills are all still useful. Many skills are mutually exclusive. For example, account skills that improve one particular class only help you when you're playing that class and not some other. While you can level multiple skills simultaneously, they have to come from different trees, so if you just want to play one character forever, you'll likely end up putting a bunch of development into trees you can never use.
Certainly, there are a lot of ways to screw it up. Having never played the game, I'm only familiar with the theory at a high level, and not the fine details. But it strikes me as plausible that what they're doing could work really well. Or it could be a catastrophic disaster.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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