One interesting thing to note in this is that I think it might actually make the caravan system in Crowfall that much more important to the economy. Refineries may be the main source of rare ingredients, and thus more critical to the game than they first appear. The good news is that this could make raw common materials virtually free. Everyone goes in being able to harvest and create anything they want, so the limitation will be those random uncommon drops. Otherwise early prices on general goods will tank and the market should eventually stabilize around the rarity of goods. The best plan to live by is selling early and buying late.īecause player advancement will be carried over from campaign to campaign, the only tech-up component of the economy will maybe be who owns which forts or keeps. As industrial capacity spins up with more players harvesting more resources, the price of goods will drop. Rapid inflation means that you’ll likely want to throw as much as you can on the market as quickly as you can, and price it to move. If this is true and Crowfall does end up with a more bang-or-bust economic model, this’ll dramatically change the way players want to engage in the economy. In the same way that popular FPS games have streamlined the process from entering a match to getting into combat, this economic model may accomplish something similar for folks more interested in the industry side of MMOs. I’d never considered it before, but this could work very well. Virtually every economic sim and RTS has elements of this sort of limited-term and rapid-inflation economy. I said earlier that I’m not sure we’ve seen this in an MMO before, but I think we have seen it in other genres. Each new campaign is effectively a self-contained economic opportunity, and that could be a really good thing. In that point, you see why I think we need to look at Crowfall and its economy as a tactical economy. Caravans are slow and they will be vulnerable to attack… Because both the output from campaigns and then input back into new ones is throttled, I’m not sure the macro-economy of the Eternal Kingdoms will play that large of a role in the micro-economies of the campaigns.Ĭaravans will be needed to transport bulk material to refineries for processing. Players can exfiltrate materials, gear, and items for various upgrades, but you can only carry so much with you into the next campaign. Any effort put towards infrastructure and defenses in each campaign will of course be wiped out at the end of the campaign. Obviously, there will be some persistence to the economy, but I’m starting to see that part as negligible compared against the whole. In early conversations, that felt like a cool take on the normal persistent economy. I think it was obfuscated a bit by the talk about the Eternal Kingdoms and the opportunity for players to take some resources back with them at the end of campaigns. I’m not sure anyone ever put a name on it, but I look back and see the bones of the economic model I see taking shape now. Today, we’re going to look at a number of these new mechanics like limited-use blueprints and resource refining to understand how that fits into this tactical economic model, which I think may be new for the MMO genre. I would say those games were more about a strategic form of economy with long-term goals, and Crowfall is more about a tactical economy.ĪrtCraft Entertainment has taken a number of key steps forward in fleshing out their economy, and that lets us put together a better idea of what the finished game should look like. You’ll see nods to those games as several of the developers worked on SWG in the past, but Crowfall isn’t a game about creating conflict through economy in quite the same way as those other games. Crowfall isn’t trying to be EVE Online or Star Wars Galaxies. The second thing is that you have to acknowledge what Crowfall is and what the devs are targeting as an end state. I wouldn’t say that economy has been an afterthought precisely, but it’s certainly played second fiddle to a host of other development objectives. The main drive was combat and then the implementation of all the various core systems that support how Crowfall will effectively be an unlimited number of MMOs under a single umbrella. First, there hasn’t been a whole lot of focus on economy up to this point.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |