Crowfall Devs Detail 'The Road to Alpha' in New Blog

In a new blog post on the Crowfall site, Creative Director J. Todd Coleman details the "Road to Alpha", numerically v6.0. Currently, the pre-alpha version 5.8 is live on servers and Coleman writes that it has been "VERY well-received" and has resulted in "both increased player concurrency and a noticeable uptick in new players".

At least one more significant update will be released for Crowfall that is "an internal clean up version that will add polish, not new features". Rather, it will be focused more on performance and technical improvements, as well as on more noticeable front end changes like smoother animation transitions, etc..

When Alpha launches, it will come with a "handful of features" including the Dregs ruleset (guild warfare) and War tribes (AI driven monster groups).

Lastly, Coleman writes about "Beta and Beyond":

Not everything will be in the game at alpha, but we hope to narrow down the list of new features and content so that our subsequent versions between now and release are increasingly made up of bug fixes, polish and optimization instead of adding “new stuff” to the game.

As with every MMO, at some point you have to “call it”; you decide on the specific list of features that you want to have finished (and polished) at launch and what will need to come later. Inevitably, there will be more things that you want than you can possibly fit on the schedule… which means that we will have to make some hard choices on what comes now and what comes later.

On the plus side, an MMO is never done. We can continue to add new features and content forever. The architecture of Crowfall is perfectly suited to this approach as each campaign is an opportunity to try a new variation on the existing rules and experience.

Check out the full post on the Crowfall site.