Crowfall AMA with Executive Producer and Creative Director

His post didn't seem to come through because his account wasn't verified, but here was Todd's response:

1) I'm not a programmer, but from a production stand point I can tell you that the Unity pipeline and toolset are world class. The editing features -- where you can interrupt the program while it is running, change a UI, and then "unpause" the game to see the results of the changes without having to re-execute is pretty amazing. MMOs are huge games, and anything you can do to increase the iteration cycle for making/testing changes is a HUGE win, in terms of overall time (and therefore cost.)

In terms of performance, we were an early participant in the Unity 5 beta, and I think the performance increases have been pretty fantastic in this version. Again, though, I'm not technical enough to do a deep dive into the render pipeline... but from what I've seen, the engine is very impressive, and MUCH easier to adapt to an MMO than most of the other commercial engines available.

2) Absolutely, when a game makes BILLIONS of dollars in revenue, suddenly that's the "right" way to build that kind of game. It means that the people funding these games all wanted WOW success, and the best way to pitch WOW success is to start the pitch with "Wow, only with XYZ".

I feel like we had more innovation before WOW, because no one knew what was possible (and therefore, what wasn't.) Crowdfunding has really changed this equation, quite frankly because the people with the money (you) are better at picking visions that will be appealing to a large audience. Of course they are, right? Because the idea only takes hold if it manages to attract a large audience. It's basically taken the traditional studio "green light" process and democratized it.

Thanks for playing SB, btw! That was my first professional game, and it was a hell of a ride. I'm glad to be able to go back after all this time and try some of those design ideas again.

/r/Games Thread Parent