knightsbayne

This has been a banner year for survival games come. Now we have the open beta for Life is Feudal: MMO. The game is grim, difficult, and dangerous, but damned if it isn’t a joy to play. However, keep your nose to the grindstone because Life is Feudal: MMO demands lots of time and patience in order to achieve anything substantial. This is our Life is Feudal: MMO review.

If you listen to the Crowfall developer streams, they reference Shadowbane regularly. That’s where Crowfall’s inception began. Looking at what Shadowbane was and what Crowfall plans to be, there are striking similarities between the two.

Crowfall’s latest big patch released last week so I’ve had the chance to test the newly revamped harvesting mechanic that the devs so refer to as action harvesting. Vamped it is. Action harvesting adds two new, very unique additions to typical MMO harvest. By typical, I mostly refer to WoW, SWToR, and even MMO-lite games such as Ark: Survival Evolved.

Crowfall tantalizes us this week with their next major patch a day after they drop the most recent one. Pre-Alpha patch 5.3 went live Tuesday and Wednesday’s Q&A was about patch 5.4. In a move that surprised exactly no one, Crowfall has adopted the industry’s rotten golden goose: microtransaction. Yea, I said it and yea it tasted as bad as it sounds.

I believe ArtCraft may have cracked how to bring a crowdfunded game to market. The Crowfall team’s knowledge of the business side of the development has led to an additional $6 million investment, which according to their funding tracker was roughly an additional 60% in funds. And while expanding the Crowfall team is great news, their announcement to use those funds for marketing is equally excellent.

Last week’s Crowfall Q&A had Gordon Walton on and he talked about transitioning Crowfall from its crowdfunding stage to the next: marketing it for its release. Today, a week after that Q&A, ArtCraft released a founder’s update. This update lays down the details about the upcoming transition from crowdfunding the game to selling its preorders.

This week’s live Q&A had special guest Gordon Walton, co-founder of ArtCraft, on the stream to answer questions about the business side of Crowfall’s development. I’ll paraphrase the more interesting notes from the live stream since most questions aren’t all that interesting. But if you’re interested in jokes about EA loot boxes and a behind the scenes look at bug fixing, you can watch the video below.

It can’t be all good news all the time in the mire of MMO development. Crowfall is no different, especially given its crowdfunding roots. Yesterday, J. Todd Coleman and Gordon Walton announced to no one’s surprise that Crowfall would not release on their sort-of deadline at the end of this year. They instead moved that date back another year, hoping for a “soft launch” in 2018.

Crowfall’s biweekly updates are starting to show development towards it becoming a fulfilled, even if it is slow to those of us outside of development teams. Small details like UI visuals and character sheets are often overlooked quality of life improvements that make huge differences for players.

Testers jumping into this super early phase of the game can get a taste of the skill system that will, in some form or another, show up at launch. It’s this skill system where the SWG’s influence is most felt, followed shortly by Crowfall’s plans for crafting. What was once an entire class, whose tree required job specific experience to level a profession, takes form in passively trained passive skills.

Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation is more than a long-winded title. It is a video game adaptation of a board game adaptation of the increasingly popular, you guessed it, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. As such, the video game has all the same pitfalls and restrictions of the board game without the hassle of setting and cleaning up the board and a lot more visual finesse.

My time in Crowfall has been limited to harvesting, crafting, and fooling around in the Eternal Kingdom building. Writing about harvesting and crafting is fairly moot however with the drastic changes coming to harvesting in 5.3. Crowfall’s harvesting quickly leveled up from a standard MMO doldrum activity to resource gathering that will be interactive and have diverse play styles.

The team at Wargaming flew me out to San Francisco for an indepth look at World of Warplanes’ newest revamp. While in their offices, I had a chance to interview Al King, Global Brand Director of Wargaming, and pick his mind about his thoughts on the new World of Warplanes and what he plans to achieve with the 2.0 patch.

The guys at Wargaming.net flew me out to take a gander at the newest World of Warplanes 2.0 patch, in what is essentially a re envisioning of the game. I got to meet with the developers and get a hands on with the new Bomber class and play with the Wargaming team on the new objective focused maps. Al King, Global Brand Director of Wargaming, also took the time for an interview about how the team reached 2.0 and their future plans for the game, which you can read here.

Crowfall’s Eternal Kingdoms are player’s home away from the campaign battlefield. This guide will help new testers through the beginning steps of building their Eternal Kingdom, especially for those who aren’t familiar with testing games in pre-alpha stages of development where there are no tutorials.