Crowfall Sounds Like A PvP MMO

I’ve been interested in the dribble of Crowfall information that has been coming out over the last weeks. I liked the art style, and the initial bits on character creation looked interesting. That is until they started in with The Hunger Week. Now it’s starting to lose me.

I’m on board with the idea of a periodic “reset.” I actually like the idea of starting over now and then, but then I’m sort of an altoholic, so it fits my playing style. I realize that not everybody would like that though.

But then they kept talking. Excerpts below, emphasis mine:

One of the key elements of strategy games is they have a win condition followed by a board reset.  You start the game, you play the game, someone wins.  You reset the board and start a new game.

Phase 2 is Summer.  The Hunger starts to infect the creatures.  Resources become scarce.  Your team claims an abandoned quarry and must fight to keep it.  You use the stone to build an ancient keep, to use it as staging areas to attack their neighbors.

Your guild frantically builds a wall around your city, as the nature of conflict shifts from smaller skirmishes to siege warfare.

Your kingdoms grows in strength; your neighbors falter and you demand that they swear fealty or face complete loss of the Campaign.  Instead, a handful of smaller kingdoms choose to band together against you.

Your Kingdom emerges victorious, and you return to the Eternal Kingdoms to enjoy the spoils of war.   Your adversaries head home, too — to lick their wounds.

This sounds a lot like a siege-based PvP game, with some survival thrown in. It sounds like it will be like WvW in GW2, or Cyrodiil in ESO. Now, if you’re into WvW-style PvP, then Crowfall actually sounds like a neat concept. Unfortunately for those of us who have never considered MMORPGs as “competitions,” Crowfall doesn’t sound very appealing any more.

It almost sounds like they’re being deceptive about it, too. If they were proud of the PvP nature of their game, and they thought that MMO players craved more PvP games, why not feature that prominently? Why not give us a big headline that says, “This PvP Game Is Going To Be Awesome For PvP!” Instead, they’re hiding the PvP in a complex wall of text about The Hunger and Campaigns, like they’re trying to fool PvE players. Not cool.

I’d love to be wrong, but given that they’re leading with PvP information, I have a feeling that any PvE elements are going to be afterthoughts.

P.S. I never played Shadowbane.