ArtCraft Reveals Plan for First Combat Playtests

ACE co-founder Todd Coleman took to the Crowfall site today to lay out plans for the game's first playtests, focused entirely on combat. Read on for the details.

In short, the upcoming tests, their goals and even a vague "when" of late summer this year. There's a whole host of goodies in the blog post, but here are the important bullets from Todd:

- As noted, we've rebuilt the combat system that you saw in the video. (1) It needed to be hardened, it was too fragile for launch, and (2) it wasn't good enough. Sometimes you have to break a sword to reforge it.

- This test will be limited in content. We don't need all the archetypes, nor will we have them all done; we'll have a few. We might include a few monsters—since a lot of that functionality is already working—but we also might not. We'll try it both ways internally and see if they add to or detract from the testing and the experience. Remember, our primary objective is to test the PvP system and we need to stay the course.

- The goal is to make this a multiplayer combat test in a 3D environment that (at least somewhat) mirrors our vision of campaign combat. It will be smaller in scope, content and functionality, but we want it to have the immersive excitement of an MMO not just a few rounds of Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

 - The powers won't be the "for reelz" powers. They also won't be balanced. Remember, this is pre- (pre-pre-) alpha testing. The focus is on the system itself—how it feels, how it works—rather than the specifics of any given power or skill. Since we're including a small number of archetypes, we may, for testing purposes, squeeze powers onto them that they normally wouldn't get.  - The test will be limited in size and scope. We don't need a huge group, nor do we need to run the test 24x7. We'll bring it up for a limited window of time, test it, break it and take it down. Then, we’ll make some changes, rinse and repeat. We'll do it as long as we need to until we learn what we need to learn, and then we'll go back into development mode to work on the next milestone.

- Testers will be selected in order. That means that we'll start at the beginning of the list of pre-alpha testers and invite people until we have as many as we need. If we need more, we'll invite more until we have enough and then we'll stop. Testers won't be bound by an NDA so they will be able to talk freely on the forums, in podcasts, etc.

- We're still working out the details, but we want to try to build a wrapper around the experience so that it isn't just an arena "death match," meaning that we'd like to have a game system that gives you context for who you are fighting and why. The key is that we'll see what we can do without wasting effort on "throw-away" code that isn't going to advance towards the eventual game vision. That said, if we can complete a simple and engaging wrapper, we'll do it!

Be sure to read more at the official site!

Blair, ready to watch us beat each other.