The Crowfall Kickstarter campaign is within $100,000 of its base funding goal (as of this writing), and ArtCraft Entertainment have announced the first round of stretch goals for the project.

Regarding the first stretch goal, ArtCraft explain their reasoning thusly:

We aren’t happy with our combat, spell and environmental FX. The current FX in the game are placeholders… not ideal, but it was the only option available, because we didn’t have a full time FX artist. Usually games have at least one artist who specializes in making amazing visual FX (explosions, fire, smoke, lightning — you name it.)

Since we don’t have a dedicated FX Artist, we handed that task to one of our other artists (Eric) and made him do it. The result are FX that look good, but not amazing (no offense, Eric!)

And freeing up their character artist to work characters — and only characters — has a side benefit:

With this extra capacity, we’re going to add another gender option for one of our previous-locked raced: the Centaur Legionnaire archetype. That means we’ll have male/female variants on: Druid, Ranger, Champion, Confessor, Knight, Templar, Frostweaver… and Legionnaire!

Multiple wins, for the price of one stretch goal!

The second stretch goal, meanwhile, sets up what will doubtless be still yet other stretch goals for the game:

Mounts are something you guys are already familiar with: find a drafthorse or a warhorse, saddle them up and ride them across the countryside.

Now take that concept and expand it, giving your mounts the ability to carry goods for you and expand your inventory. This opens up a whole new type of gameplay, where ambushing other factions and guilds becomes a lot more interesting (and lucrative!) and opens the door for more systems later (like taming and breeding!)

As well, ArtCraft recently showed off some images from two of the concept artists they engaged to help define Crowfall’s visual style. Both Marc Simonetti and Mike S. Miller should be well-known to Game of Thrones fans; both have contributed significantly to the art of that series and its spin-offs, and both were asked to draft art concepts of the game’s characters, settings, and monsters. You can see Simonetti’s piece, above; I’ll suggest you click on through to check out Miller’s.