Camelot Unchained, from creator of DAoC

[Nehkara]

Hey guys!

Just wanted to share this.

Mark Jacobs (Former Lead Designer/CEO of Mythic Entertainment for DAoC) and a team of guys have created a new studio called City State Entertainment.

They are looking at making an RvR-based MMORPG called Camelot Unchained.

The project is on Kickstarter, currently at 46% ($0.929 out of $2.0 million) funded with 24 days remaining. Mark Jacobs will match the goal of the Kickstarter (contribute $2.0 million of his own money) if the project funds.

Rather than ramble on about it, I will just use links!

Forbes Interview with Mark Jacobs

Camelot Unchained Website

Kickstarter

[FanIn80]

Wow nice! Loved DAoC (well, at least up until ToA was released).

[RinkRat]

ToA wasn't all bad.....Added some neat things, but I havn't enjoyed a game as much as I did playing on Mid Merlin for so many years. Kinda hoping Elder Scrolls online can fill that void.

[TheGrimm]

DAoC will quite likely go down as my favorite game of all time... The days of running around Emain or the stealth vs. stealth battles and BG's. If they would just update the graphics and gameplay a bit and make it free to play I'd probably do another tour.

[PsYcNeT]

Mmm DaoC...some of the best PvP ever played in an MMO.

Might have to break my "no more KS" rule for this one.

EDIT: Rule broken. Threw 30$ (woo) at this badboy.

[CaramonLS]

Be interesting to see how it is going to turn out.

MMOs have seemingly evolved from the DoAC days, where there was an unwritten rule to travel around in smaller groups as opposed to numbers zergs that we have seen in GW2 and others.

It will also be interesting to see what they take from a game like GW2, which had some amazing ideas for WvW combat, but had some questionable and gamebreaking implementation (enemies not LOADING ON THE SCREEN).

[FanIn80]

Shrouded Isles is still my #1 favourite expansion for any video game, ever.

[TheGrimm]

Now I am totally craving DAoC..

[GreenLantern]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Wow nice! Loved DAoC (well, at least up until ToA was released).

So up until Mark Jacobs was put in charge?

Interesting.. as he is creating this game? :P

I read some interviews a while back, this has received minimal hype, about as much as Garriot's new RPG. MJ was responsible for the down fall of DAoC, he can make all the excuses he wants to (which believe me he has made plenty of already trying to promote this game), but it comes down to him making bad decisions and ultimately running a successful game into the ground. Chasing off hordes of loyal customers in the process.

Matt Firor was the reason DAoC was a good game, and besides simply copying the system I can't see them having much success with MJ at the helm. But hey, prove me wrong.

I also have trouble giving these guys money when they sleep on a mountain of it every night..

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by GreenLantern

So up until Mark Jacobs was put in charge?

Interesting.. as he is creating this game? :P

I read some interviews a while back, this has received minimal hype, about as much as Garriot's new RPG. MJ was responsible for the down fall of DAoC, he can make all the excuses he wants to (which believe me he has made plenty of already trying to promote this game), but it comes down to him making bad decisions and ultimately running a successful game into the ground. Chasing off hordes of loyal customers in the process.

Matt Firor was the reason DAoC was a good game, and besides simply copying the system I can't see them having much success with MJ at the helm. But hey, prove me wrong.

I also have trouble giving these guys money when they sleep on a mountain of it every night..

Oh crap. I didn't know about that. Back then, I didn't really pay attention to specific names - I just loved DAoC while hating Mythic (pretty common sentiments).

Now I'm not so excited anymore.

...but I have been thinking all day about firing up some DAoC again! Hopefully they've made it a bit more solo-friendly now, since my guild and alliance are all long gone.

I fired it up about six months ago, and spent about 30 mins getting re-oriented again before heading out with my zerker. I took two swings at a mob and ran out of endurance, then had to auto-attack it to death, followed by sitting down on the ground for 30 seconds to regenerate enough endurance to pull another mob... and then I started to remember some of the reasons I left for WoW in the first place, and logged off.

[nik-]

they fell pretty flat with Warhammer ... but I'm still not sure whose fault that is.

[CaramonLS]

Originally Posted by nik-

they fell pretty flat with Warhammer ... but I'm still not sure whose fault that is.

EA botched an MMO?

Say it ain't so.

[TheGrimm]

Originally Posted by FanIn80

Oh crap. I didn't know about that. Back then, I didn't really pay attention to specific names - I just loved DAoC while hating Mythic (pretty common sentiments).

Now I'm not so excited anymore.

...but I have been thinking all day about firing up some DAoC again! Hopefully they've made it a bit more solo-friendly now, since my guild and alliance are all long gone.

I fired it up about six months ago, and spent about 30 mins getting re-oriented again before heading out with my zerker. I took two swings at a mob and ran out of endurance, then had to auto-attack it to death, followed by sitting down on the ground for 30 seconds to regenerate enough endurance to pull another mob... and then I started to remember some of the reasons I left for WoW in the first place, and logged off.

The thing I always forget is that I was one of those guys rocking two computers, one for my buffbot and the other for my hunter. Buffing was one area of the game they really should have done more to fix. You simply couldn't compete as a solo stealther without it.

[Nehkara]

Camelot Unchained has reached $1 million. 22 days left.

[Nehkara]

CU just reached 7500 backers. I just wanted to bump this to see if anyone missed it or is interested in backing. It might be tight to make it to the goal. Sitting at $1.18 million with 15 days to go. Goal is $2 million.

For the uninitiated, Kickstarter is all or nothing. If a project hits its goal, then it goes ahead and the money goes from the backers to the project. If a project fails to hit its goal, no money goes from the backers to the project.

To hopefully alleviate some of the annoyance over my prodding... Here is the viking female concept:




... and new race just created tentatively named St'rm:

[Nehkara]

To actually go and read about all the ideas they have for the game would be quite time consuming (I know because I did it!), but I wanted to share a few of the things that I thought were really cool. Note, that I fully expect some people to think these things are NOT really cool.

1. Realm vs Realm vs Realm gameplay. All PvP essentially, however, the noted crafting class below provides an interesting alternate side of gameplay.

2. Economy is completely player driven. All gear is crafted, not dropped.

3. Crafting-only classes. Crafters will make all gear and will also build stores, houses, mines, walls, towers, other defensive structures, bridges, other buildings, and siege weapons.

4. They are putting forth an effort to make classes quite different from each other and races as interesting as possible, rather than recycling often used stereotypical races (elves).

5. They are building the engine in house to handle massive numbers of players on screen at once (up to 1000 I believe) while keeping frame rates high. This will allow for some massive battles.

6. Painful death, time consuming to rejoin battle. Limited fast travel options. These two will give large battles an element of strategy as it may take time to get reinforcements if you lose a large number of troops.

7. Leveling will be slower than usual for the genre and progression will be horizontal rather than vertical (i.e. You will get stronger and gain new abilities but high level characters will not be able to kill low level characters by "sneezing".)

8. The Depths

Lots of other stuff too but I am exhausted this morning. I'll update this if I can remember other details.



The only other thing I want to address is... Green Lantern mentioned that he doesn't want to give money to people who have money. Well, I don't really see how this is different from buying a game from EA/Activision/Blizzard or any other successful game company. They have lots of money too.

In this case, instead of going to a large publisher for backing for the game, CSE has decided to go to the fans for backing because they want to make a very specific type of MMO and they don't want to make compromises that large publishers would demand to mitigate risk and increase subscriber numbers. Basically CSE is doing the Kickstarter to ensure there is enough support for the game to be made and to provide initial funding. Mark Jacobs will be kicking in another $2 million if the Kickstarter funds.

[PsYcNeT]

There's still a chance, as long as people keep pushing the word out!

According to KickTraq, C:U is trending to exceed it's goal. Woo!

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/138...lot-unchained/

Though, the actual projections have it falling ~300k short :/

[Nehkara]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

There's still a chance, as long as people keep pushing the word out!

According to KickTraq, C:U is trending to exceed it's goal. Woo!

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/138...lot-unchained/

Though, the actual projections have it falling ~300k short :/

There is a lot of confidence in the community that it will get funded. The community is pretty awesome too. A very high pledge/backer number. Also, over 35,000 comments!

I looked at the trend lines of a lot of other games that have been funded and they all see a MASSIVE uptick in backers and pledges in the final week of the Kickstarter.

Example:

Pathfinder Online



Elite: Dangerous





CAMELOT UNCHAINED (To Date)

[Nehkara]

CU hit $1.3 million this evening. It will need a big boost in the final 9 days to fund but I'm confident it will happen, similar to the other projects I noted above.

[Nehkara]

So there have been a lot of updates recently about the crafting/building system in CU. There will be a dedicated crafter class for each realm and they will make all of the gear and build houses, mines, walls, towers, siege weapons, keeps, etc.

There is a video demo of the building system up on the Kickstarter page right now that is worth watching if you are interested in roughly how the building system will work in CU.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/462972