There have been a number of updates posted to the Crowfall website over the few weeks, including yet another “State of the Nation” Founder’s Update. ArtCraft Entertainment are still raising capital, having added roughly $700,000 of a planned $1,000,000 to their coffers, and they’ve also been looking at expanding the game to various “overseas” markets. They’ve also set out a new stretch goal, the aim of which is to hire a dedicated video producer:

OK, so we jumped the gun on this stretch goal. All of the video work you’ve seen at crowfall.com has been done by John Gibson, who has worked as a part-time contractor for us since well before the Kickstarter campaign. We believe that video is one of the best ways to communicate what we are doing for the backers of Crowfall, and we hit a point where we really need to either convert him to full time or let him search for other opportunities.

We can’t have that happen! So, we’ve decided to take John from a part-time contractor to a full-time employee, which should up the frequency (and variety) of the videos we release. That said, we need to find a way to pay for him, and we need help. If you like the videos that we have produced, and you want to see more of them, then help us hit our new stretch goal of $80,000 to help cover the cost of future video production.

An article examining the current plans for the abilities and powers of the Legionnaire archetype was also posted late last month:

The Legionnaire is our first archetype to fill a battlefield commander (frontline support) role, so we have been doing a lot of exploration to figure out exactly what that means in Crowfall. One of our early stated goals was to avoid recreating PvE-style firehose healers. Typically, support-oriented characters stand in the back, have a healing rotation and manage health bars rather than pay attention to the environment or movement of the combatants.

With the Legionnaire, we’ve taken a very different approach. While this archetype sacrifices raw damage to gain access to heals, group buffs and debuffs, they are still frontline fighters. By design, we decided to use a rage mechanic to force participation in the fray, to ensure that they were active, engaged participants rather than passive support.

…

The Legionnaire is currently very focused on melee attacks, movement and a few critical support powers. He also has a handful of secondary control tactics available via physics impulses on his powers. Our goal for the Legionnaire is to be that frontline melee-healer, not a very common role in MMOs, but very interesting in a physics-based combat model. Additionally, it also seems to fit this archetype very well as a character who is well-suited for melee and also geared towards group-play.

We hope this gives the basic Legionnaire a good kit of potentially fun toys to play with…and, of course, plenty of room left to customize.

We also got another look at ArtCraft’s ongoing work on player fortresses and keeps, including a video of their work-in-progress models:

https://youtu.be/kneqDhm56MQ

They also released this video introducing artist Allison Theus:

https://youtu.be/Ub1XGMCt43k

Also, you may recall that a few months back, one of the Crowfall stretch goals was to hire a new VFX artist. As it turns out, ArtCraft received enough support to bring two new artists on board to handle visual effects, and they released a first look at their work toward the end of July:

https://youtu.be/yT9pyA49LkU

Another Q&A about combat in Crowfall was also released:

Topics for this episode of “Combat Chat” include:

• Our philosophy for designing group-based combat, and how this affected the powers of each archetype
• The relationship between weapons, powers, attacks and damage
• Our thoughts on Crowd Control powers
• Stacking effects: how Confessors might work together to exploit Sin… (or not!)
• The implications that our physics model will have on projectiles

https://youtu.be/PZAL7KB1qL4

More recently, a longer update concerning the abilities and attack powers of the Confessor archetype was published. This is the latest in a series of Confessor-focused updates, and actually showcased the class’ powers in a video:

And finally, just yesterday, another general Q&A post was published, in which J. Todd Coleman and designer Thomas Blair answered a bunch of backer-submitted questions:

• What design choices are being implemented in order to protect a character infiltrating a guild as part of the espionage metagame? Is espionage going to be an important part of the game? What is the structure of characters as they relate to guilds?
• What features are currently planned for sub-guilds and alliances?
• What incentive do players have for winning a Campaign World (CW) when Eternal Kingdom (EK) resources are no longer needed?
• Will there also be CW leaderboards?
• Is the Voxel engine still being utilized?
• Do you have any specific strategies for building a cohesive worldwide community?
• When the Iframe invulnerability is active can you push though other players?
• How will we protect players who are offline with regards to CW points of interest (POIs — quarries, mines, etc.)?
• Will there be specific time zones for launching and ending CWs?
• Will there be any buildings (either obtained or crafted) that can be placed by players within the CWs?
• How firm is the 40-second time to kill (TTK) goal? That seems a bit quick for tanky types and a bit slow for glass cannon types.

Right, that was a lot. Remind me not to let myself get behind on Crowfall news again.