In Crowfall’s latest video, Executive Producer Gordon Walton and Design Director Thomas Blair answers questions from the community on a wide variety of topics and lays out a roadmap for the near and long term.

Gordon Walton, co-founder of ArtCraft Entertainment has confirmed the recent layoffs on the Crowfall team in a recent Founder’s Update, and attributed them to a “switch from launch mode to a live service operation”.

I’ll start with some sad news, in that we lost some teammates as we shifted from launch mode to a live service operation. We’re working with all these folks in helping to identify new positions for them as quickly as possible.

The post goes on to talk about increasing access to PvP campaigns and sieges, the Eternal Kingdom loading problem, and improved system designs that are coming up.

Artcraft, the studio behind Crowfall has suffered from layoffs according to Val Massey, who was the community manager at Artcraft until last year. She is now the Senior Community Manager at Novaquark, the studio behind Dual Universe.

There has yet to be an official statement from Artcraft, but fans of Crowfall have posted on Reddit that Key Crowfall Engineer Thomas “Hanse” Eidson was among the layoffs.

The Crowfall 2021 Eternal Champion Series will kick off tomorrow. The PvP tournament will pit 12 five-man teams against each other in the Hunger Dome.

The winning team will walk away with the $25.000 Grand Prize, but there are also a bunch of other prizes to be earned from Intel, Razer and Alienware who are all sponsors of the tournament.

There is also a Crowfall closed beta key giveaway running at the moment for players that want to get in on the action.

Earlier this week Crowfall Creative Director, J. Todd Coleman revealed the future plans for the development of Crowfall. The plans were later posted on the Crowfall site.

The plans were broken into three parts short term(before and right after launch, mid-term (after launch and into the next year, and long-term (next two to five years).

A new version of Crowfall has hit the Test server featuring performance improvements and fixing a few known issues.

Among the fixes are a framerate stutter issue and how grass looks and impact performance.

The devs have also implemented a culling system;

We added a new culling system to help performance as well. “Culling” is a way of removing items and effects from the scene to improve framerate — and, in theory, you shouldn’t notice anything but increased performance if we are removing the right things. (again, that’s in theory).

This should fix some of the know issues but this is still a test client where bugs are expected and it will take time to iron them all out.