I haven’t checked in with ArtCraft Entertainment and news pertaining to Crowfall at all this year, which was clearly a mistake because there have been a number of news updates posted to the project website since the new year. Indeed, one of the first updates posted made a point of marking the dawn of 2016, and was actually timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Crowfall website. The most notable bit of news in that update is that there are new crowdfunding pledge packages available in their crowdfunding store.

There was also a new Q&A video posted for the month of January, which covers topics such as character movement, avoiding artificial boundaries and playtesting.

Crowfall’s Terms of Service were also updated, and many of the changes thereto seem to be concerned with refunds:

Up to this point, we’ve been doing ‘no questions asked’ pledge package refunds. (The official policy stated in our ToU has always said no refunds, but we weren’t enforcing it.) These requests aren’t made very often, but the process for accommodating them is complicated and far more time consuming than one might imagine.

The reality is that proceeds from the sale of pledge packages aren’t squirreled away in a little bank under Tully’s desk where we can easily shake out a few coins here and there. The money is invested in the company and is actively being used as working capital to develop the game. It makes financial planning more difficult when you’re doing all you can to make every penny count but piles of pennies suddenly disappear from the pile. Consequently, the time has come for us to firm up and enforce the ToU in regard to refunds.

Note that we are not insensitive to the fact that sometimes bad things unexpectedly happen and we have made provisions for that in the ToU. We also allow individuals to sell their retired pledge packages—retired packages have a higher resell value than current packages, by the way—although we don’t allow solicitation of pledge packages through Crowfall service (which includes the forums and social media channels). We are looking into options that will give our backers safer ways to buy and sell pledge packages in the future. We’ll tell you more about it after we’ve done a little more fine-tuning.

And as January ended and February began, we also got to meet engineer Vlad Judys, and another Founder’s Update which included revelations about the upcoming skill system, a pledge package trading program, and a new testing reward.

In terms of game content, ArtCraft also published a number of updates about goddesses, castle building, and more. We were introduced to Maeve, the sea goddess, and also Illara. There is also now a reference page for Crowfall’s pantheon of gods.

We also got a look at the Ranger archetype, including some of the equipment that will be available to Rangers. Somewhat related to this, ArtCraft also published an FAQ page about training your character.

And finally, it’s worth mentioning the three–part video series featuring various members of the development team discussing the castle building feature, and various issues related thereto.