Camelot Unchained’s latest newsletter has arrived, and in it, apart from the recap of development progress, is a deep-dive into how City State approaches the creation of new classes, something Game Designer Ben Pielstick says is “never an easy task.” Devs must avoid creating overlap in roles with other classes, at least where they’ll be directly compared – like in the same faction. Instead, similar roles require differences like utility features that “set classes apart from one another” and create “situation usefulness.” Happily, that reduces the endless grumping over balance too.
“Due to the complexity of classes in MMORPGs, there are always some unforeseen results when introducing a new class. Even though a lot of testing and iteration goes into each class as it is initially built, players in aggregate will spend far more time than developers ever could, exploring every characteristic of each class and how it can be used to maximum benefit. This often leads to developers making changes soon after a new class is introduced, in order to account for the surprises as players first discover what a class is really capable of.”
You, like folks on Twitter, are probably wondering about bigger questions like “When will this game be released?” To which CSE replied, “Date not announced yet. Great question for one of our Friday Q&A sessions.” So there’s the latest. As readers will recall, CU is quite a bit behind its original schedule; in June of this year, the studio told us a 2019 launch was still possible but unlikely. “If/when we make the determination that we can’t make 2019, we’ll let our investors and our Backers know,” Mark Jacobs told us, reiterating that truly peeved backers can still get refunds.
