(This piece has been updated at the end with stream notes.)
Throughout its long (long) development history, Camelot Unchained has been almost mechanical about its weekly updates – on Fridays. Even when there’s not much to report, or at least nothing of broad interest, City State Entertainment does a weekly roundup of the mundane progress its multi-studio devs are making. It’s a good and a bad thing, as we’ve noted before: People want to see progress, but most progress turns out to be incremental and also boring, leading to the belief that everything is moving slowly. Which… it is. Game dev, in other words.
Well, the team appears to be shaking things up this week with a separate state-of-the-game stream starting at 4 p.m. EDT today; a tweet from the team says CSE boss Mark Jacobs will be helming the episode. We’ll update this piece with whatever the big news is that merits a Halloween showing!
In the Q&A portion, Jacobs said he expects to have a better idea of a release window early next year, within three to six months (for when he’ll have a clear picture on launch, not for the launch itself). More employees and engineers are being onboarded too. More classes, crafting improvements, better lighting, CUBE buffs – these are considered mandatory features that need to be finished an in place before launch is on the table. He also notes that while people are likely to be angry with him and the delay right now, he’d rather eat that anger now that next year (which is part of why he thinks continuing to issue refunds to those who ask for it is the “right thing to do”).
Jacobs also points to the ongoing “Linuxification” of the game as evidence that the team is serious about finishing the game, pointing out that if they weren’t serious, they wouldn’t bother with that, that they’d use those engineers on something a lot more interesting instead of on something fundamental to release.
We spoke to Jacobs this past summer to ask him about the ongoing beta, knowing that the game was Kickstarted over six years ago and is now many years behind schedule. At the time, he wouldn’t confirm that the game was being delayed past 2019, suggesting there was still a chance if enough engineers were secured, but now we know for sure.
