Three new updates have been posted to the Crowfall website since we last checked in with ArtCraft Entertainment’s progress on the game.

First off, if you backed the game at a level that entitles you to reserve a guild name, you’ll be getting an additional reward:

If your pledge package includes “Reserve Guild Name”, we’re adding another reward, the Company Garrison Guild Hall. On reflection, it seemed silly to us for backers to receive a reserved Guild Name but not have a guild hall for your Eternal Kingdom! There are several different designs (concepts coming soon) and, once we get them into the store, you’ll be able to swap one guild hall for another for no additional charge.

If you have already consumed your package that contained “Reserve Guild Name”, you’ll get the Company Garrison Guild Hall automatically added to your rewards within the next 48 hours. If your package hasn’t been consumed yet, the guild hall will show up when you do so. Remember, don’t consume your pledge package if you anticipate upgrading in the future! You’ll still be included in your testing group without consuming the package.

More recently, Design Lead Thomas Blair published his musings about crowd control:

In the early days of MMOs there were some extremely broken implementations where those being controlled just had to sit and watch while their characters got killed. Each game had its own variety of pain: Ultima Online had Paralyze Fields, Dark Age of Camelot had an entire realm nicknamed “Stunguard” based on the Thane perma-stun, and nothing really beat being pistol whipped to death in Star Wars Galaxies at a rate of 1 point of damage at a time spread out over 5 minutes — and that’s just to call out a few. There are many other fine examples.

Almost all of the MMOs made the same mistake, or at least mistakes of the same flavor. We’ve all been there. Permanent crowd control was typically patched out of the game within the first year of launch. Those early days though… Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!

Not surprisingly, Crowfall will handle crowd control a bit differently:

Eventually it became pretty standard for Developers to start putting crowd control counters into their initial product launch. (Some still miss it though!)

• Virtually every game that has crowd control also has some form of trinket or breakout power that enables the player to get out from under the effect, every-so-often.
• Some games also choose to reduce the duration of any subsequent crowd control powers, halving the duration for each application during a short period of time. (ie first suffering from a 6 sec stun, then 3 sec, then 1.5 sec, and finally nothing).
• Finally, some games render you completely immune to crowd control after suffering from enough control powers.

In Crowfall’s first pre-alpha combat milestone, we are going to try a mixed approach: we’re going to use the halving-duration technique, coupled with a short duration immunity after suffering from multiple crowd control effects. Players will also have access to a power called Retaliate that gets them back on their feet instantly when they are knocked down; however, the cooldown is such it can’t be used very often.

Stuns and knockdowns are the main forms of crowd control in this milestone. More types of crowd control will come online later as we need them to fill out the power trees for each of the various archetypes and disciplines. While Confessors do have a power that has a vertical knock-up component, we consider it is more of an interrupt than crowd control. The same could be said of the Knight’s chain-pull power with its inverse horizontal pull component.

There’s also a video showcasing the collaborative design style ArtCraft uses, as well as another video showing off the animation of the gryphon (which is embedded above).

Most recently, UX Design Lead Billy Garretsen gave us a bit of a look at the changes to Crowfall’s UI that have been made over the last couple of weeks.