Crowfall -
Monumental
I joined the Crowfall team as Game Director shortly after the acquisition of the game from Artcraft Entertainment by Monumental. As a big fan of Shadowbane, the precursor to Crowfall, as well as PvP MMOs in general, and getting the opportunity to work on a project made with Unity, it seemed like a great opportunity. It was also quite a challenge taking a game that had only launched the year before after several years of public testing and was already down to only a very small loyal fanbase, and turn it into a successful MMORPG.
My approach was to first familiarize myself with the product and the team. I anonymously joined a guild and played through the most recent campaign to see the game from a player perspective, and started attending meetings just to listen in and ask questions before making any decisions. As I compiled my notes it quickly became clear the scope of the changes that would be required to increase the viability of Crowfall as a modern MMORPG. While the CEO and company President agreed with my product analysis, the scope was far beyond the reach of the resources they had allocated to the project, so an aggressive plan to find efficient solutions would be required.
I decided to work directly with experts at Unity utilizing a Technical Architecture Consulting agreement to determine the technical scope of work and best practices updating the game to the latest version of the engine and improve performance, which was one of the game’s biggest issues. At the same time I had the design team do a deep dive competitive analysis with top tier MMORPGs to find the best MVP features to focus on improving to bring Crowfall more in line with MMORPG player expectations.
Working with the Executive Producer I established a set of milestones and signoff criteria for stakeholders at each step of the project. Studio leadership was pleased with our project at the end of every milestone, but unfortunately due to the economic downturn forced the project to be put on hold indefinitely, with the team being laid off or moved onto other projects. While this was a very disappointing outcome for everyone involved, I felt the experience was incredibly valuable I’m very proud of the work the team was able to accomplish.
When I started work on Crowfall, more development time was going into live operations than making improvements to the game. The team size had been reduced since Monumental acquired the game from Artcraft and brought over only a portion of the original developers of the game, but it was still hard to understand why a game with no significant updates was costing so much to operate.
After initial investigation I learned that the team was holding daily triage meetings to go through the surprising number of bug reports received each day to hand out to developers for immediate investigation. Alongside this workload, the campaigns that started on intermittent interviews between two and six weeks required a large amount of manual work to produce.
What I was initially told was a procedural system to generate campaigns turned out to require artists and designers to make a lot of fine tuning adjustments on top of the procedural system output. Terrain puzzle piece tiles didn’t fit together perfectly, and changes like level caps and spawn points required multiple layers of changes.
As a stopgap measure I worked with the Executive Producer to stop the daily bug triage meetings and instead start building a backlog for everything except showstopper bugs, and account issues that could be handled by the Community Manager. I also had the current campaign in progress put on loop when it was finished, so that the game would continue to operate with minimal manual changes.
Ultimately we found that this level of support was still too high, and in order to focus the team 100% on fixing the major problems with the game, I worked with studio leadership to approve shutting down the live service of the game and committing to a relaunch with a set of changes to re-engage old players and attract new ones. Shutting down a live service game is never an easy decision, but it gave Crowfall the best chance of becoming a commercially viable product.