Hey folks,
Once of the coolest parts of the Crowfall vision is that “every world will be unique”. Not just the rules, but even the map; our goal was to build a system that allowed us to create unique world layouts out of reuseable components. Hand-crafted look and feel, but every world map unique.
Our next playtest, we’re making that happen.
First There Was One
For the last month (or so), we’ve been running three servers:
- US. East,
- US. West, and
- EU
All of these servers were using an identical map and identical rules… so other than network ping time, it really didn’t matter which one you picked. Mountains, valleys, graveyards, monster and resource spawners… all three worlds were exactly the same.
Nobody really commented, because that’s the way MMOs work.
Now There Are Many
In our next big update, we’ll be replacing those servers with new worlds:
- Sorrow,
- Misery,
- Mourning, and
- Sanctuary
The first three will use the ruleset from before (open world PvP). The fourth world is a “public Eternal Kingdom”, a world that is safe, but resource-starved (i.e. it only spawns knotwood, cobblestone and slag ore). Once these worlds are up, the next step will be to turn on the account bank and the import/export system, at which point we’ll have a (rudimentary, but functional) game loop: players can brave the campaign worlds to find and secure resources. They can take those resources back to Sanctuary, and then buy/sell/trade them with other players.
Yes, of course there are a TON of other features that we need to make this experience really work – like houses and vendors and faction rules to vary the campaigns.
But this is a start, and it’s a BIG leap forward in technology:
We are actually creating unique world maps for every one of our servers!
Stop and think about that for a second, because it’s practically unprecedented in MMO genre. The implications of what we can do with this system is pretty staggering. A universe of unique, dynamic worlds!
Normally, we won’t be releasing world maps for new worlds because we don’t want to shortcut the exploration game that comes with entering a fresh world. In this case, though, we’re making an exception because nothing says “We have unique world maps!” like showing off four unique world maps!
As I said last month, it’s taken us some time to get here, but it’s starting to come together. Get ready, because things are about to get a lot more interesting.
Todd Coleman
Creative Director, Co-Founder, ArtCraft Entertainment