Crowfall is a Kickstarter MMORPG that celebrated its release in 2021 after almost seven years of development. But this one didn’t go well. Right from the start, the number of players was lower than expected; after a few weeks hardly anyone was talking about the game. For now it’s going offline to come back with new content.
What is happening to Crowfall? On November 22nd at 18:00 GMT Crowfall will be shut down. From then on, the servers will no longer be accessible.
The developers explain that it is incredibly exhausting for them to run an MMORPG live and at the same time work on new content and campaigns. Therefore, the live service should be shut down until Crowfall is at a stage where it can appear again.
It is currently unclear how long the servers will remain offline. It was also not revealed which innovations are being worked on.
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What game is Crowfall? In 2015, Crowfall was announced as a game that would play like a season of Game of Thrones. Various campaigns were planned that players can win and thereby gain advantages in the Eternal Kingdoms.
The Eternal Kingdoms is a persistent, social world where there is no PvP, but players can showcase their achievements and earn fame and recognition. The other campaigns should periodically end and return with new rules.
A broad class system was also announced, with 11 classes and a total of 33 sub-classes. However, this took a lot of development time.
How did the release go? Rather sluggish. Crowfall was in a kind of open alpha for years, so that all fans could constantly assess the progress. But the official release dragged on. When the MMORPG was released in July 2021, many fans had already moved on and there was no hype.
There were also a number of problems with the release, including poor optimization and performance, an interface that took some getting used to, a rather weak tutorial and a boring crafting system. The PvP focus should also have deterred many potential buyers.
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What is the future of Crowfall? Uncertain. The first layoffs took place as early as September 2021. In December 2021, the game and the developers were sold to a new studio. The new owner, Monumental, is actually a mobile game developer.
Exactly what the studio intends to do with Crowfall now is unknown. However, the reason for the temporary shutdown is very difficult. A service game actually lives from the fact that it is operated in live mode. A shutdown for a complete reorganization is expensive.
While this worked for Final Fantasy XIV, several other MMORPGs that took a similar step simply never came back online. That could potentially bloom Crowfall as well.
I myself already predicted at the beginning of 2022 which MMOs will probably die in 2022. Crowfall included:
I predict these 6 MMOs will die in 2022