ArtCraft Entertainment have launched the second pre-alpha test of Crowfall, and they’ve given it the name Siege Perilous. Which name should be instantly familiar to you if you have any experience with Ultima Online, as Siege Perilous is also the name of a high-difficulty shard in that game.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release I received about Crowfall’s Siege Perilous:

In this latest phase of testing, Pre-Alpha 2.0: Siege Perilous, participants split off as soldiers supporting Chaos or Order, either laying siege to or defending a castle. In addition, the castle destruction system is now online, allowing players to tear down walls and topple towers with real-time server side physics.

Five of Crowfall’s eventual 13 archetypes will be available to players in this round of testing: Champion, Confessor, Knight, Legionnaire and the recently-added Ranger.

“This is an incredibly exciting milestone for us,” said J. Todd Coleman, ArtCraft co-founder and Crowfall’s creative director. “Our previous tests centered on PvP combat, which is obviously critical to our game but not unique to the market. Our physics-based castle siege system marks the point where Crowfall starts to separate from the other games available in the market.”

A project jointly supported by crowdfunding and private investors, Crowfall’s 2015 Kickstarter remains among the most successful campaigns in the video game category. Supporters were amazed and delighted when the first phase of external testing began just six short months after the Kickstarter ended. Reception has been highly favorable and the game has been lauded on several “Most Anticipated” lists, including those for IGN.com and MMORPG.com.

I haven’t been following Crowfall-related news all that well this year — have I posted anything about the game at all? Be that as it may, the team at ArtCraft have (as you might well expect) been keeping busy. They recently rolled out a new player archetype, the Druid, and have been making adjustments to the game’s UI. Catapults have been added to the game now; I believe that’s what’s destroying the wall in the screenshot above. The screenshot, by the way, was taken from this news post, which also discusses some of the early results of the Siege Perilous testing.