TE: Crafting is a huge deal in Crowfall. Is it your goal to have dedicated crafters who might not be much involved in battle?

Todd: Yes, absolutely. There will be three pillars to the game in terms of core experience: You've got combat as a core pillar which comes out in a strategy game; you've got crafting and economy as a core pillar; you've got exploration as a core pillar, both of the world and the game systems. There's also the political layer, but it's a soft skill and not a hard skill. We don't have a whole skill tree devoted to it. The political stuff is more about social engineering with other players. It's present in every MMO, quite frankly, but the difference here is because we have opened up the game system to allow players to actually influence the world and influence other players around them, suddenly it makes a difference in a way that it never has before, or at least it hasn't for many years. If you look at our crafting system, the bones of it were created by Thomas Blair and Raph Koster, both of whom served as the lead designer at one point or another on Star Wars Galaxies. I think that players from Galaxies who are really into that side of the system are going to absolutely love what we're building in Crowfall, because it clearly was inspired very heavily by that game.

TE: With player housing can you go inside your house and decorate it?

Todd: Yes, it's a full building system. In fact we just announced and released more information on the city and castle building stuff and started putting out the castle building sets, like showing how many towers and wall segments and ramparts you get. That system has come a long way. When we originally started I wasn't positive we would be able to do it. I was worried that with destruction it would be a non-starter technically, but we figured out a way to make it work. So we just announced and really opened that system up. I think the players are going to really love it. It's similar to the Shadowbane system, but I think it's superior in a lot of ways. We mix it with our parcel system which are basically segments of land that are like Tetris pieces so it's not just about building up your castle within a mountain valley. It's also about stacking the mountain valley next to a giant chasm and putting that next to a swamp. You are literally terraforming the world around you. It's an incredibly powerful and incredibly cool system and I don't think that's been done before. I think that's an area of innovation were tackling head-on.

TE: How was Gamescom?

Todd: It was crazy. It felt like about three or four E3's all squished into the same set of buildings.

TE: I saw you had about 30 women with helmets with crows on their heads.

Todd: I never saw that! Travian [their European publisher] did that. They did tell us, "hey we're going to have some people with crows on their heads" and I just gave them a puzzled look and said "okay, that sounds great." (laughs) I need to follow up and see how well received that was. I never saw it because I was in interviews most of the time. I missed a lot of cool stuff that was out on the floor.

TE: Looking at some of your forums, the people who were there at Gamescom said that October is a special month, according to you guys. What's happening in October?

Todd: Yeah this September-October time frame is when we're targeting for us to make the jump that I mentioned earlier, from running our test as little matches that are less than an hour and sometimes less than 20 minutes, and making the jump from that to a real large-scale world with persistence that we're going to run for days if not weeks. We're starting with days, then weeks, then eventually forever. So it's really a jump from us building test scenarios to building the actual game. That's a big thing.

TE: You can craft bodies in Crowfall as you mentioned, what are the ingredients for that?

Todd: It will literally be body parts. You're going to hunt down cadavers and use those as ingredients to mix and match to create new vessels. There's a whole necromancy branch of crafting which is I think is very dark but it's very cool.

TE: You're currently in alpha, what is your schedule for beta and what are you targeting for release?

Todd: It's really pre-alpha. I should say that first, because when you only have a server that comes up for 24 hours it's hard to claim that that's alpha. We have a lot of functionality in and that's great and a fair amount of content on the character side, but making that jump to a larger world is going to be a big deal for us. So we'll have a full playable game with the servers up and running 24/7 by the end of the year. The target launch is now mid next year. When we did our Kickstarter we were really hoping to do it by the end of this year but unfortunately that just wasn't possible. We were a little too aggressive with that. But we will have people up and running in something that feels a hell of a lot like the real game by the end of the year. And then next summer - I'm purposely being a bit broad in that - we'll have to see how that plays out to be more specific.

TE: Why a guinea pig race and not otters or hamsters or something else?

Todd: I asked Allison, one of our concept artists, to do a lineup of the pantheon of the Gods for me early on so we could see what all of them look like in a row. And I'm not sure why but for some reason she just inserted this little guinea pig wearing plate armor with a battle axe in the middle of the lineup. It's just god, god, god, guinea pig, god, god. I think she was just kidding, but it really made me laugh, and I thought about it and the idea of having a small race in an MMO, there's a long history of that. Practically every MMO has some kind of small goofy race. And I didn't just want to do a gnome or a little halfling or whatever, so I thought that would be kind of fun. It harkens a little bit back to Wizard101, which, while it wasn't aimed at adults, I was incredibly proud of. It was enormously successful. It was my most successful game by far, by leaps and bounds. So I thought that would be kind of fun to include one small race. I've always been a fan of Narnia, and I like Reepicheep. He was my favorite character. So I thought for our small race that would actually be pretty cool. It's our chance as a development team to wink at the camera. The rest of the universe is so dark and so gritty that having one race that was basically light-hearted and pure of heart and noble, I just really liked adding that as a counterpoint into the overall thread of the universe. It just felt right.

TE: What is your favorite game of all time?

Gordon: For me it would be Ultima Online. I could still put thousands of hours into it and never plumb the depths of it.

Todd: That's tough. I'm going to have to say the original DikuMUD, oddly enough. If you look at hours invested in playing and in running, that's the one that shaped me the most, both as a player and as a designer. And it's a text-based adventure! (laughs)

TE: Final question: who is going to end up on the Iron Throne?

Gordon: I think the Iron Throne doesn't let people sit on it very long. (laughs) Lots of people got a turn on it already; I mean how many people have already sat on it? It's about when does the story end. What you're asking is when is he going to stop the story? Because somebody will always try to take whoever is on the throne down again.

Todd: If he doesn't end up putting Daenerys on the throne that will be a giant shocker.

Gordon: Which means he probably won't do it.

Todd: It seems like fate. The classic interpretation of fantasy literature would say that it's either Daenerys and/or Jon Snow, but it would be interesting for him to end up making it an underdog like Tyrion. That's certainly possible. Or somebody that nobody expects like the Hound, right? (laughs)