ArtCraft Entertainment have pulled back the curtain on a massive overhaul of Crowfall’s graphics today. There was even a press release that got sent out:

AUSTIN, Texas, May 16, 2017 — Independent game developer ArtCraft Entertainment, Inc., makers of the highly anticipated Crowfall® massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, announced today a major upgrade to the game’s character customization system and an overhaul of the graphics and lighting engine. Crowfall will soon be adding races and classes to the character system, an effort made possible by the company’s continued success at crowdfunding and private funding efforts. In addition the company is upgrading Crowfall’s graphics engine with direct assistance from the Unity Spotlight team.

“When we started this project, we decided to use archetypes instead of allowing players to separately choose a RACE and a CLASS for each character,” said Artcraft CEO and Chief Creative Officer J. Todd Coleman. “This limitation was mostly driven by content cost, and thanks to our fundraising efforts, we can now afford to build the vision we originally wanted. This will give our players an incredible amount of flexibility to create the unique characters that they want to play.”

…

“We have spent the last few months overhauling our lighting system,” explained Gordon Walton, president and executive producer at ArtCraft. “And the results speak for themselves. I have no doubt that our current backers, and our future players, will be delighted by this significant leap forward.”

To illustrate the scope of the changes that have been made, ArtCraft released a pair of videos on their YouTube channel. The first is a massive fly-through of the game’s environments, showcasing the graphical improvements that the team has made with help from Unity’s own engineering team:

The second video, meanwhile, showcases some of the changes — expansions, really — to character customization. More details about this can be found on the Crowfall website:

I haven’t posted a lot of Crowfall-related news in the last several months, and I think I’m going to stick to just reporting these massive updates; the ArtCraft team continue to churn out news and updates at an impressive rate, and you’d be far better served following their news page than waiting for periodic updates here.

But these changes were significant, and were well worth remarking on. It’s also worth noting that Crowfall has, as of this writing, raised $12,319,718 USD in funding, both from backers and investors. And clearly, some of that intake has been put to extremely good use; the game always looked good, but it has really reached another level now.