What will the new year bring for the long-awaited, long-brewing Camelot Unchained? You might find out sooner rather than later according to the very last post from 2019 that City State Entertainment put up on the site. In it, Mark Jacobs said that a growing testing pool will get to play with a “ton of new and fun stuff” this month. What’s more, Jacobs hinted at a major reveal from the studio.
“I promise you that in January you will see everything that we have been working on since then come together in an experience that you might not have expected from us based on our updates alone,” Jacobs said. “It is a massive, immersive experience that is unlike anything we have shown you to date […] It’s going to be a fun experience, not a tech demo!”
If you’re devouring all word from CSE about Camelot Unchained, make sure you read the most recent newsletter as well, as it contains (among many other things) an intriguing article about how the team is working NPCs into the game.
And why not start out the new year with a cozy chat with none other than Mark Jacobs?
Is the public facing reveal you’re/he’s talking about actually scheduled for January? What are the odds it can be pushed back to February or March?
It’s been a long road, but I remain confident that Mark and his team will deliver so it’s hard not to just jump on the hype train for this announcement even though it’s tempting to do so. I wonder what it will be…
Thank you for your confidence, no need to jump on anything right now, just wait for the reveal. It’s always safer that way, no matter who the developer/publisher is, including yours truly (especially after our delays).
I’ll be interested in hearing what you think when we do show off most of the stuff we’ve been working on since July.
I enjoyed reading about what’s going on in the newsletter. I’m a huge fan of the armors I’ve seen. It’s my biggest hope that CU doesn’t delve into high-heeled, short-skirted metal bikini outfits that can be dyed in neon pink and bright orange. ><
LOL, for CU? Not a chance, not now, not ever. :)
Thank you, well done as always.
You and me both lol.
And me too HP, me too.
I’ve been hyped up by Mark before. Lots of hyped up promises and unmet expectations. I love him to death, I believe in his team’s sincerity to complete the game, but I can’t be excited about anything that isn’t the game launching. Why get excited about something that could never see the light of day?
Remember the BSC days?
Remember the hype to the build up of beta? With the beta 1 doc?
Never finished. Ignored. Never really updated or mentioned. The last page has said “to be updated next week” for over a year. It was supposed to be our go to page for updates on the beta and what was coming next.
The developers seem to get really excited and passionate about an aspect of the game, and then get distracted by a new shiny piece. It’s a major red flag for me in terms of what we could expect post launch.
At the end of the day, I feel like Mark belongs in the same boat as Will Wright and Peter Molyneux.
They’ve definitely stopped updating stuff like the beta 1 doc, but if you make the leap that not updating the beta document means they’re getting distracted by new features, I think that leap’s unfair.
I’m in testing, and I haven’t seen them work on anything that’s outside the core of:
– low lag and playable FPS in large battles
– siege and building destruction
– player made ability system
– block by block construction
– crafting
– 3 realm RvR stuff
Can you name a “new shiny piece” that’s been a distraction for them?
Noting that: 64-bit client seems necessary for the game to work on modern hardware, server-code going to Linux represents 30% savings on the cost of running servers (during testing and through to launch and beyond).
HP, thanks for jumping in and you are spot on in terms of the 64-bit client and the move to Linux. We were wrong about how long it was going to take but in fairness to the team, it isn’t like we had made this kind of move before especially for as large and bespoke of a codebase we have.
You’re welcome :) . And ya that seems fair, ain’t always possible to know that stuff in advance.
Yep, as per above, we definitely messed on the the early iterations of the ability system. We have nobody to blame by ourselves for that. OTOH, stuff like moving to Linux is another matter.
It’s going to be a fascinating January, it really is.
Some of what you say is fair criticism but what is just a bit off is the distraction bit. Things that have soaked up time (refactoring of the ability system, moving to Linux, building destruction) were all things that had to be done to deliver the game that we talked about in our Kickstarter. And, 2 of the 3 are running nicely (ability system, building destruction) and the move to Linux should be finished in the next few weeks. So, I don’t think that we are getting distracted by the shiny stuff (we haven’t added any stretch goals in years) but rather doing some things now that needed to be done before launch (and we did say so).
However, you are spot on in terms of your criticism of the time we took to complete some of those same things even if some of them are quite hard (networked building destruction of a block-by-block building of 9.5M blocks) but it did take some time but it wasn’t ready for prime-time before just before the summer as you know (if you were in our tests). Now, as to what has happened in the last six months, that will be shown and played this month by our Backers. No excuses, no delays, it will be playable because it already is playable. It’s not polished yet, not optimized yet, but it is playable.
Again, I absolutely accept the valid criticism and I apologize for the delays but we are still working on the game and we have a lot of cool and necessary things that are coming to fruition this month.
Thanks, as well, for the kind words along with the criticism, they are appreciated.
Maybe “distracted by shiny stuff” was a bad analogy. And thank you for replying. It’s bittersweet being a Kickstarter backer for so long. Sweet because I’m proud of the work the team has done, and the company behind it has turned into, but bitter because of the time it’s taken. 7 years come May.
And there’s no use crying about it. It is what it is, no amount of complaining will change the course of history, but hopefully lessons are learned going forward. Perception is key. How the project is perceived to be coming along is important.
So whacha gunna do with the beta 1 doc? ;)
Add some new screenshots to the website!
Maybe give a few small video clips of in progress gameplay.
Anything other than concept art and walls of text. Please. Mix it up a lil!
Hopefully you’ll enjoy what we show this month. I promise that it will be more than a few bits of concept art, way, way more than that.
And thanks for your support and patience, that is appreciated!
It has been 7 years?
Not yet. Our KS was in 2013 and we began work on the game in October of that year.
So yeah, not 7 but 6/7 it doesn’t matter, we’re quite late.
He’s such a tease, isn’t he? I’m curious now.
Hehe, sometimes but not this time. We will definitely be inviting Backers in this month (hopefully next week) and have started to show a few outside folks what we’ve been working on. I want to be able to show off the results of our hard work to everybody before the end of the month. We have to knock a few things out before we do that but none of them are tough issues, just stuff that needs to be coded. And, our updates talk about some of them so I wasn’t trying to tease too much. A lot of what’s going to be seen has actually been talked about publicly, dots just need to be connected. :)
I hope you like what you see.
I’m excited, can’t wait to see things beginning to be cohesive! CU has been on my radar for a while.
Looking forward to seeing it, but I will admit some trepidation that it’s now however many years in (5, 6, 7?) and the post has a lot to do with the intricacies of NPC spawning and scripting. I’m sure there’s complexity involved, but it’s also a road that’s been well worn for 30 years now. It should be background, not your major callout.
Anyway, time to get the launcher set up on the PC bought after the PC I bought when I first backed the game.
Well, that’s only part of it but the hard part is not basic NPC behavior and navigation, it’s doing that at scale of 1K+ NPCs and players. And since we are dealing with things that can be added/built by the players, we need new and improved solutions and not just the old school techniques. Thus, it isn’t as simple as it seems. I’m sure you remember the issues games, even recent ones, have had with pet/NPC navigation through a dynamic or semi-dynamic world space. :)
But, there’s a lot more than that but it was/is a technical challenge as it still is for developers once you throw our kind of scaling at it.
Let’s all hope that experience is called Launch.
C’mon BB, you know that isn’t the case and frankly, if we tried to launch CU as an MVP now it would be a disaster. What we’ll be showing is exactly what I said it is, a new, immersive experience that shows off a lot of what we have been working on since July. It’s that, nothing more, nothing less. :)
I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they have to show off.
It’s going to be a really interesting month for our Backers, that’s for sure!
In the update I asked Backers if they had availability during US working hours and a good rig (GTX 970 or better) if they wanted to volunteer to help us test this thing. We’ll be bringing in the first group next week with a few other folks tomorrow. I’m just finishing off an updated NDA right now. Once it’s approved by legal, we’ll start inviting people in.