As of this writing, Crowfall has three days remaining on its Kickstarter, and has reached most of its financial objectives. However, they are very close to some very cool stretch goals, including Oculus Rift support. Click here to see the Kickstarter, and if you want to help out, act now before the Kickstarter ends!

It’s fashionable to point out disclaimers of prior relationships for articles like these. In the case of Crowfall, I share this information proudly. I’m old friends and colleagues of both of Artcraft Entertainment’s principals (as well as multiple other people at the studio). Gordon Walton is one of the smartest, most influential leaders in the Massively Multiplayer space, and likely the best mentor and boss I’ve ever had. Todd Coleman is fresh off of his stint working at Kings Isle (where he was the design id behind the very lucrative Wizard 101), and he’s as driven, insightful and laser-focused a Creative Director as you’re ever likely to find in the MMO space. He is exactly the sort of person you want corralling a crazy MMO startup into reality. Put simply, the pedigree of the studio leadership alone should be enough to convince you to go back Crowfall if you love competitive Player vs. Player MMOs and truly next-gen thinking in the MMO space.

But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about what they’re actually going to build.

I worked with Coleman on Shadowbane as part of Wolfpack Studios. I joined the company shortly before they shipped the game (to be honest, too late to impact much one way or the other), and I continued there working on Shadowbane and various other products until the game went Free to Play. I joined up because it was a crazy ambitious vision for an MMO – a game about building massive cities, and then going to war and burning them down. It was a damned exciting vision. I frequently joked that it was either going to be a ‘thing’, or it was going to be well worth having front-row seats to the results.

Shadowbane shipped to fervent excitement by the fans. The day we shipped, googling ‘Shadowbane’ got more results than ‘Star Wars Galaxies’, despite us having virtual no marketing beyond board warrioring. The idea behind Shadowbane is a gloriously big one, and judging by the success of Crowfall’s kickstarter so far, is one that still has resonance today.

Shadowbane did not stick the landing on their launch. Technical issues marred the release – mostly due to the inexperience of the team, a problem that Crowfall should avoid – and it took some time to get the game stable enough to actually see how that core vision bore out. And what we found was that the vision for the game was fun and exciting, but had a very interesting fatal flaw. And that is that it never ended.

Shadowbane PvP was completely freeform – no precreated ‘sides’. Instead, each warring faction was a completely player-created guild – often merging into alliances. And the problem is that typically, one of the alliances would get so big and dominant that they’d completely steamroll over any new guild that started up. Because your city tied to your success, steamrolling another guild’s city increased the gap, making it easier for the leaders to maintain control overall. The dominant alliance would typically become so dominant that peace would reign uncontested. Which, if you’re making an MMO based upon the vigors of war, is a disaster.

The most interesting fallout to this, academically, was that one time a server got so bored having nobody to kill that the Alliance leaders decided arbitrarily to ban a player class. For a week, all Thieves were Kill On Sight. Which is cool in an emergent gameplay sort of way, but also reveals how the game was fundamentally sick.

The players got it too. We frequently would have better logins on days we launched a new server than on the days we put up major patches. Shadowbane players LOVE to have a fresh Risk map to start dropping castles onto. When I left, we talked frequently about whether or not it was feasible to make worlds with a shelf life the core to the game’s design. After I left, Shadowbane wiped the servers to kickstart a clean map feel again. Outsiders were aghast, but the cheering of the playerbase was vocal and emphatic.

Shadowbane was not the first game to deal with this problem. The first to do it well was World War II online, which had a similar problem where the game servers would end up locked in a situation where one side (the germans – It was always the germans) would have the other pinned into a miserable no-win situation. WW2OL solved the problem a simple and elegant way – declaring a winner, and resetting the map. Some observers were concerned that this would result in ‘taking away’ some of the earnings of the victors, or ruin the game by destroying the sense of persistence, but this proved not to be the case. The winners were happy enough to get the bragging rights of victory, and the losers were just happy to have hope again.

Crowfall is not Shadowbane 2, but it is clearly deeply influenced by Coleman’s first game. As such, I found the fact that Crowfall’s Kickstarter video spent most of their time discussing their fresh map solution – (“eternal heroes, dying world”) a true indication of the fact that these guys are shooting for next generation thinking about MMO gameplay far and beyond simply cloning WoW.

The ambitions built around these disposable worlds are a lot of fun. Worlds are fully destructable, which means that the difference between a pristine new land and one ravaged by warfare will be made clear. Also, the physics of the worlds can completely deviate from one another – the idea that some worlds may offer better resources, or have stronger rules of magic, for example, become possible.

Will it work? There are no guaruntees. It is a bold, ambitious, and breathtakingly exciting vision for a fantasy MMO – and yet at the same time one built upon solid design thinking and the hard crucible of experience.

Go check it out.

As of this writing, Crowfall has three days remaining on its Kickstarter, and has reached most of its financial objectives. However, they are very close to some very cool stretch goals, including Oculus Rift support. Click here to see the Kickstarter, and if you want to help out, act now before the Kickstarter ends!