Crafting Changes and the Damned Dirty Word

By Jacob Semmes on December 14, 2017 | Columns | 0

In what has become standard fare for those us anxiously watching the development of dozen or so MMOs that promise us the return of MMO glory, new and improved content is revealed right after the previous new and improved content hits the testing phase. 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. So while testers are digesting 5.3, the Crowfall team is hard at work hammering out the next swath of mechanics. Continue reading for a breakdown or watch the video yourself down below. With Pre-Alpha 5.3 having just been released yesterday, you can expect a detailed experience about this much anticipated patch from me next week.

Q&A Takeaway

Aside from the release of the assassin, Pre-Alpha patch 5.4’s Q&A only has a few big takeaways. One is that the team has begun working on sound, which couldn’t possibly be any worse than the default Unity assets currently being used. We’ll call them placeholder sounds.

Crafting is going to start seeing some overhauls and implementations beyond the skeleton that is currently is. Crafting stations are being added and these unlock the different recipes of crafting quality tiers: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced. They didn’t go into details on the statistical difference of these qualities so testers won’t really know until the next big patch but we will begin to see the framework of their crafting system coming together. The crafting stations can be added to your Eternal Kingdom because who doesn’t want to brew poison in their very own dungeon. With this comes an improved crafting UI. Essentially, crafting is getting another iteration in what will most likely become the first of many. Here is the update that focuses entirely on the crafting changes the team talks about in the video.

Input buffering is another change that Game Designer Mark Halash calls “the action game secret sauce.” This should let players play with “more precision and intention.”

Interesting class customization options via disciplines will be possible soon. Minor disciplines give access to higher tiers of armor that classes would normally not be able to wear. So a druid can equip heavy armor is he/she equips the discipline for medium and heavy armor. While we don’t know fully how or why a druid might do this, it still opens up a great deal of options for creating unique characters.

The Damned Dirty Word

Finally, 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 won’t dig too deep into that veritably infinite hole of debate. However, feel free to join in and give you opinion over on our news article. Honestly, this isn’t anything different than selling the pledge packages from before. Just now a proprietary currency is purchased in order to….purchase...more stuff. It’s an evolution of their crowdfunding roots, and their subscription model still offers the best benefit for players. I’m awfully surprised they decided to even use the same terminology, following so close to the Battlefront II fiasco. For now. I can’t honestly say how it will impact the game considering Crowfall isn’t a game yet. We’ve seen this crowdfunding turned microtransaction before. It works because pretty things are pretty things, and if you visit our site, you most likely froth at the mouth at the prospect of returning to your MMO glory days.