Crowfall

» see crowfall.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Crowfall was built on the idea that a world should be allowed to die. Every campaign ran on a clock, one month or three or six or a full year, and when the clock ran out that world closed permanently and the survivors carried their loot home to an Eternal Kingdom, the one piece of the game that persisted. It is an unusual thing to design on purpose, and it is why this grave is slightly funnier than the rest.

I did not back it and did not play it. In 2015 I was thirty-one and working, and the crowdfunded MMO was a category I read announcements about rather than a thing I put money into, which turned out to be the correct posture more often than not. What I can tell you is that the people behind it were not amateurs.

ArtCraft Entertainment was J. Todd Coleman, who had made Shadowbane and then Wizard101, alongside Gordon Walton, who had been executive producer on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. The Kickstarter closed on 26 march 2015 at $1,766,205 against an $800,000 goal, and by june 2016 the total taken from the crowd had reached $7,210,680. That is a lot of trust, and it was bought with pedigree.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Six years is a long build. Crowfall released on 6 july 2021 into a genre that had spent that entire period being told MMOs were finished, and the launch went badly in the ordinary ways. There were attacks on the servers in the first days and a population thinner than the design needed, with reviews that landed on respectable rather than exciting. PC Gamer's line was that it ended up less original than its early promise had suggested.

The design problem underneath was harder than the launch problem. A game about faction warfare across dying worlds needs bodies in it, thousands of them, sorted into rival groups. When the crowd is small, the empty map is not a temporary state, it is the entire experience, and no amount of good crafting and economy work will cover it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Monumental bought Crowfall from ArtCraft in december 2021, five months after launch, promising a long-term road map. Eleven months later, on 22 november 2022 at 11am CST, the servers went off. The statement said the team was investing in and rethinking every part of the game, from the core technology to the art and design, and that nothing was off the table.

Nothing came back. There was no update in 2023 and none in 2024, while the studio cut staff in february 2024 and the community Discord was stripped down to a couple of silent channels. As of 2026 the game is still offline with no date attached to its return, which makes this a shutdown that was announced as a pause and has now outlasted the entire live service it interrupted.

The Eternal Kingdoms are the part I keep thinking about. They were the promise that something you built would not be swept away with the campaign world, the one permanent address in a game about impermanence. They went off with everything else at 11am on a tuesday.

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