
Note: We liveblogged the stream; scroll down to the end of the post for the latest.
The past week has been a whirlwhind for MMO players and watchers of Kickstarted RvR MMO Camelot Unchained. Last Friday, City State Entertainment announced that it’s received investment to work on a second game, the co-op horde-mode Project Colossus aka Final Stand: Ragnarok, which uses the same engine as Camelot Unchained. Colossus, as it turns out, will launch first, though both will be developed in tandem using as many shared assets as possible. Backers and looky-loos alike were furious, as Camelot has been many-times delayed: We still haven’t got the MMORPG gamers Kickstarted for $2.2M in 2013. In fact, the backer-playable “beta one” version of the game has been locked behind a NDA-wall since mid-2018.
The revelation led to a ruckus over refunds (yes, the studio is still granting them, with caveats), gnashing of teeth, and then last night, a full apology for the mishandling of communications from CSE’s top boss, Mark Jacobs, a name long known to MMO fans thanks to his tenure building Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online.
Perhaps more important than the apology is the fact that Jacobs has promised backers a huge deep-dive into Camelot Unchained – the sort of deep-dive they thought they were getting a week ago when they were summoned to a stream that turned out to be an announcement for a different game. CSE is planning to demo the Cherry Keep siege to show off the studio’s progress on large-scale siege warfare (it can actually handle more than double the players originally promised in the Kickstarter). Jacobs has further promised an “immediate roadmap for Camelot Unchained for the next few months.”
According to the last update in chat, the stream with the demo and roadmap is about to begin; you can watch it below. We’ll be updating with the big takeaways as we spot them.
Essentially, he’s saying this is what the team has been working on that is Camelot-specific – everything from the ability system, the “overmind” system that controls spawning, looting, graphics – it’s a lot. It also includes linuxification, which ultimately brings down the cost of running the servers by half, which is critical to the game’s business model (and how much subbers will be paying). Jacobs does note they’re still very much on the hunt for a senior tools engineer and that the game still really needs one. He’s spending a few minutes to read all of them off and explain the big ones for people on mobile who can’t read the graphic.
The point of explaining it all, he says, is to demonstrate CSE is not abandoning Camelot Unchained – that they’ve been working on it this whole time.
Here’s the destruction.
Jacobs says he has been reluctant to show things to the public not because he was hiding something but because he wanted to be able to show something spectacular. He also reiterates that the Colossus reveal was “dumb” and that he wishes he had shown this first, but also that the team has been working on something else even bigger. The stream has gone down a couple of times from internet problems, and Jacobs notes that part of why he wanted to wait on showing everyone was that they have things still to iron out, but he thought showing everyone now even with minor issues was more important. He also says he hopes people understand that you can’t just go out and buy an engine that can do this, hence why they’ve poured so much money and work into it.
- Question from a backer trying to log in, wondering whether the crash on the stream was because 100 players were on. No, Jacobs says; the server stayed up; the crashes were a memory error with his machine.
- Question on the new scenario. Jacobs says Ben is working on it and the design has been approved. They’ll be doing a big presentation on it.
- Question on who gets into CUBE and when. Jacobs says CUBE has been lying a little dormant, but they want to open to more people.
- Question asking about more 90-day roadmaps to release. Yes, Jacobs says. He says he’d like to do more and better updates.
- Question on release year. Jacobs says, “When it’s ready.” They don’t want to talk dates. He uses this moment to point out the money from Kickstarter was spent years ago, and he’s not asking you for more. They don’t want to delay. They want the game out too. But they don’t want to “half-ass” it. They have no financial incentive to delay (unlike other games he doesn’t mention, but you know which one he means).
- Question on test servers being up long-term. Jacobs says as soon as they get a fully stable linuxification server. They’re working on this soon not soonish, as boring as it is for testers.
- Question on the skybox. Jacobs talks about BioWare’s awesome skybox and says Camelot’s needs upgrading (here is an example where Colossus helped CU).
- Question on dev roadmap and whether everything on the list will be done in three months. Jacobs says they’re going to do their best, specifically mentioning new classes.
- Question on new gameplay content, a vertical slice of the gameplay loop. Jacobs says that is exactly what is on the roadmap, like classes. He makes fun of himself for talking tech all the time, but the engine and linuxification took them forever. Now, he says, he can pull people from that to gameplay. So that’s happening.
- Question on how the investors are responding to all this. Jacobs goes off-screen and brings back a letter and what looks like a fruit basket from the investors thanking them for their work. He reiterates that they were worried about backlash before the announcement (same as he told us in our interview) but that they are behind the team.
- Question on team organization with Final Stand: Ragnarok. There is no Ragnarok team, he says. It’s just a CSE team. In fact he says Ragnarok is “essentially a mod” for the CU engine. He’s pointing out that a lot of people are working on both games or engine stuff that applies to both.
- Question on visual improvements between May and now as seen on the stream just now. Jacobs says there actually has been, especially in terms of lighting and effects models. What he just streamed was the “first playable” build, not the “polished” build, so it wasn’t obvious.
- Question on merch. Jacobs says they’re not really doing that, but yes, backers from before Friday get the game for free. He says he doesn’t want to treat his playerbase as walking wallets, so he’s not going to sell merch to you to get more money from you. Aside here about CUBE maybe potentially being its own thing someday too.
- Question on when we’ll get an idea about the game’s final visuals. Jacobs says some of it will happen with the skybox, more over the next 90 days.
- Question on whether new backer tiers will include Ragnarok. Jacobs says they hadn’t thought about it, but yes.
- Question on gameplay and whether the demo that just got shown is gameplay. Jacobs says the siege definitely is part of it, but definitely not all of it. If it’s something your character can do, it’s gameplay, from trebuchet use to crafting, even if it isn’t person-to-person hand-to-hand combat. He says that wasn’t the point of the demo, though; that the point of the demo was to show the state of the tech. He does note that he doesn’t think people are going to be blowing up the world’s biggest castle every night, but there will be plenty else to do.
- Question on which devout class is first. They’re not telling.
- Question on how much caching tech is done. Andrew takes over to answer and says virtually none – because everything is very, very live and dynamic and procedural. The point of all that is to avoid imposing unnecessary RNG on the game. (Apparently everyone at the studio hates RNG but Jacobs. There is currently no RNG in the combat in the game.)
- Question on classes again. Jacobs says he wants to add enough to get them matched up. The devout and another class are coming, then they’ll be talking more in the future.
- Question on how close graphics are to done. Nowhere close, Jacobs says. They haven’t finished locking down lighting and art yet.
- Question on whether there’s every going to be a point where the production goes on too long. When CSE runs out of money, Jacobs says. He is aware games don’t all make it, but he also says launching too early with unfinished tech, they definitely don’t make it. Investors are committed.
- Question on things Jacobs wants to tell newcomers who have seen only fresh drama. Jacobs tells people to keep watching over the next 90 days. He promises more public streaming of the game, which they haven’t done, as well as more uptime for servers and more backers in. He says it’s going to be an interesting year, but the new artists and new engineers in the last six months have made a huge difference.
- Question on what Jacobs would do differently if he could start all over. He says he wishes he could make sure they had more money upfront and started with a much bigger team, as well as had better timing – he says the industry lurching from mobile to VR to big tech companies dipping in and recruiting engineers from gaming made it super hard to recruit for lots of companies, not just his.
- Question on the roadmap. The roadmap on the stream is apparently slightly different from the one posted to the forums, down to timing of the stream.
- Question on a known upcoming challenge Jacobs thinks they will have. (There’s a long pause here, and when I tabbed back over to the stream to make sure it hadn’t crashed, I realized it was because Jacobs was trying not to cry again, sheesh.) Anyway he finally answered that the biggest challenge is that people might not give him another chance, and that’s what he’s trying to overcome. Insofar as the team, there isn’t really one – “the really scary things are either done or almost done.”
- Question on his favorite and most challenging features in both games. For Ragnarok, Jacobs says the challenge is making fun for more than a few hours, like with combo moves and more involved gameplay, but the coolest feature is a goofy bug that they’re going to turn into something fun. For CU, he says his favorite is the class after the next one.
I am really super confused about where all of this is going.
Firstly, is a “Massive Siege” with thousands of people that important for overall gameplay were CSE dedicated so much time and effort for this feature? Sure the game needs to be able to handle a reasonable amount of people fighting massive battles and not come to a halt but we know what’s going to happen months after release. People will complain about imbalances in regards to population and start asking for Battlegrounds, arenas, fair fighting environments etc. Plus lets be realistic here, if there is going to be a handful of server for the whole game, aside fro the release hype and excitement, there will be a handful of times where 1000s people are fighting in RvRvR. Most poeple have other games they play and have committed to.
Second, SEVEN years later this doesn’t look well. I say that with all honesty and compassion for MJ as DAOC was my first MMORPG and I loved that game. However, what type of software development methodology/framework is being used here to make this type of progress in 7 years? 90 day plan looks like a wish list of topics. Are you deploying Agile, SCRUM, or any other fast turn around frameworks? I just fail to see here even a basic gameplay loop or concept from character creation to leveling to social and economic structure, etc…
Maybe its all because of NDA? I was very hesitant to back this game and never backed any crowdfunded projects as they don’t tend to end well. However, I was looking forward to make a decision on backing when they released this showcase. Unfortunately, I am not convinced…
Sunk cost for me. Might as well see it through. Just need that 24 hr siege map for backers to actually get in and play whatever they have ready.
One thing I can say about all this controversy is that it made me a bit more interested on CU.
I do understand the reasons behind the second game announcement, and also why the single-player game will come first. Does it really need to be said how hard making an MMO is compared to tradicional sp games? But I also understand the frustration from the backers, since they want as much as the devs for this game to succeed.
They could’ve handled it better, but I think at least they’re actively trying to fix the communication issue. I wish them well.
I didnt post at other CU threads, so I’ll just drop my summary here.
Blizzard’s apology was 10 times more sincere than MJ’s. Cant believe some people are still fooled by this man.
Siege demo looks meh like everything Ive seen of CU. MJ as always only talks about numbers “we can generate 1000 v 1000 crowds, millions blocks” jaga-jaga. Zero awareness on how (un)fun it is.
Roadmap is vague and will have 0 transparency like everything CSE does. Who will track progress according to this roadmap? How do we know things like “review of crafting, planning of next class” were done and what exactly was done?
This quickly written roadmap and “apology” are nothing but an attempt to stop enraged backers from ordering refunds and to save face.
Thats all for now.
Not that i completely disagree with you in this specific stance, but it’s actually funny that you of all people think you have this moral highground to stand on.
Proud of my morals and sleeping well at nights. Im always direct about what I like and dislike
What morals, Oleg.
Or tl,dr…
To be fair that goes on a lot around here on a variety of polarizing topics.
If there was ever a discussion on PvP that it wasn’t implied I was some sort of mom’s basement dwelling sociopath for liking PvP it would be pretty neat.
…wait, you forgot the neck beard! >.>
Seriously though, as this should be common knowledge by now to everyone, you don’t have to PvP to be a mom’s basement dwelling sociopath, lol.
Oh knock it off, Oleg, nobody’s fooled by your posts.
First you said you were disappointed with where CSE is going, now you are defending them. Who is fooling who?
Assuming there is any grain of sincerity in your comment, are you really that clueless to see what is going on here?
That is, there is not such thing as an all or nothing when it comes to players’ views with games. For everyone views games they love or even hate is complicated…or least should be. And the more the person is into that game, more likely they find things they are critical of it. Sure you may claim some bizarre state where you find Star Citizen is entirely flawless in every way because you love it. And absolutely think Camelot Unchained a piece of crap because you abhor it for whatever reason and/or opinion. But you would be the exception here…because, believe it or not, most everyone else is all points in between. Including our Editor-in-Chief.
So there is no contradiction here at all. No hypocrisy. No saying one thing and then claiming the other. That’s all perceived and imagined in your small world view of what is going on. And instead, everything stated here would be on par for that complicated course. Just saying.
There isn’t. He’s clearly being facetious.
Im not sure why you keep posting walls of texts that have nothing to do with my posts and are based on your fantasies about what I think
Learn to read then. It made complete sense.
It was an attempt to reach out of you in the now vain hope that you would least see some reason in this, instead of you trolling insipidly…to put it mildly. Though I now see flipping you the bird would of been more effective and apt here. Least I won’t be feeding you anymore “walls of text”. /shrug
Where is she defending them?
Man, is everything in your life an absolute? If you like something, it’s the best thing ever and no other game comes across. If someone criticizes it, they’re haters. Where in the name of shitfuck did Bree defend their move? She even said on the podcast that they should have a PR person urgently, and that the reveal was a terrible way of showing off another game.
This façade of yours is irritating, and people are getting tired of it, even Bree. Everyone is already aware you are a obnoxious sycophant who can’t stop rimjobbing his favourite crap for a second.
Do us all a favor and get a new set of morals. These ones you have aren’t working.
Trying to make my critics look like an attempt to fool somebody is form of defending in my eyes.
Also since when you became so hysterical over my posts? Begging me to change my views wont work, so you can stop doing it.
Your eyes aren’t working then. Get some glasses.
I’m not begging jack shit. I’m giving you advice. You’re burning all your bridges here, and you tend to go with “i’m not on MOP to make friends”, but you go full antagonist.
Why do you think anyone buys your bs? You’re getting admonished by three different people here, one of the an Admin of the site, yet you keep stuck to your set of cheap “morals” like they’re some kind of virtue.
Oleg. Face reality. These are not morals. You’re not acting out of virtue, you’re just shittalking a developer. And you, as a Star Citizen whiteknight, is the last idiot that should be talking about a developer pulling a bad move.
Literally, you relativized a SC player dropping more than 30k bucks on a pipedream. You constantly defend cashgrabs.
And your opinions about those projects are so shallow, that i already have my suspicions you don’t play any of those whatsoever ( Except Ascension. You sound like an Ascension bootlicker through and through. ), and the only reason you come here is to shill your balls off your favourite games.
No one is going to fall for that. There are no “morals” at play here. You’ve been pulling this shit on Mark ever since CU was starting to become liked in this site, yet if anyone criticizes CR, you go full vermin and start coddling the guy like some sort of fucking poop larvae.
Grow the fuck up. Your morals are worthless garbage. You are a sad excuse for a troll, and it’s extremely pleasant for me to actively seeing people finally realizing that and calling you on your bullshit.
…if the shoe fits, bub.
I said I was disappointed in the delays and how the reveal was handled. I also think the CU demo followup was exactly what the community needed (and it’s what I’ve been saying needed to happen for like a year). Calling you out as a perpetual anti-CU troll and Blizz shill has nothing to do with my opinion on CU and everything to do with my opinion on your behavior, and now your sad deflection.
To be honest, I’m as concerned as you (well, if you were actually concerned and not concern-trolling) about their ability to hit everything on the roadmap, but when you phrase it as a hyperbolic WoW fanboy, nobody takes it seriously, so why did you bother?
Because he has no concept of shame? We’re talking about a guy that already crossed several lines that would get him banned on any other forums, like saying another member would kill someone ( Me ) or calling for a developer to “commit seppuku”, which, trolling or not, was enough in my experience to get several members banned from any forum of public opinion.
Not that i complain about MOP rules, they’re pretty relaxed, and i’m ok with it, even when a person like Oleg appears.
But i do think this crap should be called as such every single instance where he throws his “moral” garbage around and attacks someone, or something, after spend an entire afternoon licking WoW’s shaft.
I think all these indie crowd funded MMOs are going to be major flops or never release.
I like your glass-half-full thinking, Oracle.
It seems most games start with the art to get you hyped and then follow with the tech while CSE started with the tech and will follow with the art. That’s probably a better approach considering how many beautiful games we have with tech that can’t support them.
Looking at this for the tech, it’s fantastic. No, “amazing” is a better word. I’ve never regretted backing the project. I continue to be a huge fan of MJ’s work. CU is in good hands. Keep it up, CSE.
That live demo was not very impressive to be honest – the character animations were still poor, the lighting was still very basic, the color palette was not very colorful. I know it is a demo and I know this will be all improved but I was honestly more impressed by tech demos from Hadean who partnered with EVE developers for it:
I am aware that all art was done by EVE developers for this demo and a lot of assets were reused from existing game, I just show this as a way to properly demo your engine. Also, if you watch until after EVE demo you will see a little bit of castle siege physics that was done by Hadean team themselves.
As an art demo, I agree. As a tech demo, though, it’s looking great. Maybe CSE can sell Hadean their tech.
CSE can sell Hadean their tech? You are joking, right? Take a look at Hadean site, they allow for much larger scale of battles, they already tested some battle using 4k players with 10k total number of concurrent ships (players and AI). Their current aim is to reach 10k live players.
First test a year ago, second last summer, third test last November
My current aim is to make $1 billion dollars but that doesn’t mean as much as the money in my wallet.
What does your irrelevant nonsense has to do with the game engines? Hadean had already tested their engine with over 10k bots and the only reason they did not have that many live players is that they did not have that many volunteers.
I mean most of that demo was really just copy-paste missiles flying in the air while you we saw noticable FPS lag as the ship navigated around and through. I’d be far more interested to hear actual results like how many distinct models are represented there at play and what kind of FPS action are they getting as maybe that video was just lagging during recording.
It’s cool and all, don’t take me wrong, but both are just tech demos. How “impressive” each one is largely going to be subjective. With Jacobs flexing 18,000 player and AI controlled characters it sounds like Hadaeon has a ways to go to catch up yet but they appear to be on the right track.
In either circumstance this kind of engine tech simply never existed before, which it’s good there’s progress being made on it. As a veteran of large scale PvP environments the engine/lag is always a huge driving factor towards players quitting in these kinds of environments. Competition is frustrating enough without having to deal with low FPS or lag.
Of course they are tech demos, I am just saying that I was more impressed by Hadean demos compared to what I have seen in Camelot Unchained demos, especially from visual point of view. And Camelot Unchained is still far from even close to be finished, especially in terms of lighting and art and animations and rest of gameplay. And I just keep wondering if it would simply be better to license Hadean engine and redo the rest of the game in Unreal Engine since Unreal is known by many programmers and artists and has latest support for all hardware features and many assets available for purchase. Most players do not care about technological aspects and just want to see their game faster, so if Camelot Unchained can be released faster by switching to Unreal Engine and Hadean engine – this can benefit everyone.
Just to clarify: You understand they’re tech demos but your takeaway is Hadean has better visuals? And after seven years, when CU has a working engine that exceeds stated goals and expectations you’re recommending CSE license someone else’s unproven engine and start over development with Unreal?
I would of asked for a refund awhile ago if I had been able to find my purchase documents. Never use Paypal quick pay as a guest. Anyway, so I’m stuck on this ship for better or worse. I don’t know how relevant it will be before it’s released (Probably at least 2 years more minimal). With so many Kickstarters coming out and just the general release of mmos. I hope it does come but if it doesn’t then… Well, I have blown a lot more money more frivolously.
:/
Camelot Unchained and its engine are inseparable; the game would not be possible without the engine, and without CU the engine would never have been developed.
Incorrect. Eve Online, Guild Wars, Archeage, etc. Didn’t need their engine to have massive battles so… Burn
Guild Wars and ArcheAge don’t put 500-1500 people on a battlefield, no. GW2 even resorts to phasing people out to handle the load of much smaller fights in WvW. EVE Online has struggled mightily to get that many ships in the same fight without massive server disasters and has literally come up with workarounds like time dilation (slowing everything down, makes everyone a dot) to do it. That’s not a dig on any of these games, as they are still fun, and CCP’s engineers have done truly amazing things with a 2003 MMO. But that is not even in the same league as what games like CU and Dual Universe are trying to do.
Bree, the EVE developers are already exploring future engine possibilities which can allow for a scale that is not possible even with Camelot Unchained engine. They have partnered with Haedan to test their new Aether Engine which can allow for much larger battles than even the largest one that happened in EVE. And by the looks at Camelot Unchained’s progress I say EVE developers might release their next game using this engine earlier ;-)
You already covered this in a separate article.
Yeah, I know, we’ve covered its attempts with Hadean many, many times; I even mentioned EVE among the games working on this problem when I nom’ed mega battles for best of trend of 2019 (my pick lost :D). The thing is they haven’t really pulled it off super successfully yet (the demo have been a laggy, crashy mess), but they are certainly working on it. It’s cool stuff. I’m positive Pearl Abyss would love them to crack it. :D
DU is the other one to watch when it comes to gobs of players on a screen, though they haven’t actually put bots on a level with players (pulling the same resources a player would) into combat yet.
Subtle is wrong in any case; EVE most definitely needed a separate engine for even the Aether Wars demos. You can’t just go out and buy an engine that can actually do what CU is trying to do – even CCP can’t just do that. You have to build it.
Yes, Hadean engine is not complete and is not being adapted yet. My point is that CSE is not really doing anything revolutionary in this regard and by the time they will complete Camelot Unchained – EVE developers will probably already have Hadean engine used in actual game since they have partnered with Hadean ;-) Or maybe they will license some parts of it to improve their current engine to the point which would allow them to beat their own record, and not only in space.
FYI, been following that engine since it was announced. We’re both doing cool and revolutionary things but until either Aether or Unchained proves that they can work in a LIVE game, neither is proven tech. Just as in our case, it’s a long way from great tech demo to game.
And BTW, we’ve done a lot better than our video in terms in networked NPCs/players. We haven’t produced a Tech Video because we aren’t licensing our engine. But, we did 3K players and Bots in a small battlefield and rendered /networked about 18K NPCs in another test. And a 10K test is easy if you are talking about rendering/networking things that are far apart. The challenge is when you have to do it up close and personal. Put 10K players into a tiny battlefield, network and render that and then you really have something special.
I think it’s fair to say we are both doing interesting things. I look forward to seeing both engines evolve over the coming year.
Mark, you have been testing all of that in your engine for over 7 years now, and for many people only thing that matters is a final result. And from what I have seen in stream the final result does not look very impressive so far, at least from visual point of view. I know you will be improving it but it will take more time and at this point wouldn’t it be easier to switch to something like Unreal Engine for graphics and Aether Engine for scalability? A lot of programmers are familiar with Unreal and you can easily purchase many art assets for it and it supports latest graphics features like Ray Tracing and many third-party SDKs and plugins, and to allow large battles against AI or live players there is Aether Engine which works with all major graphics engines. You can also use both for easy cross platform support.
Also you mentioned you are not licensing the engine – are you not even planning on ever licensing it? It would make even more sense to just switch to existing solutions – sure you will have to pay licensing fees but if they will allow you to create game faster do the licensing fees really matter? You can always compensate licensing fees by adjusting price of your game.
I’m beginning to get the feeling that very few people realize how revolutionary your engine is.
“not only in space.” Because that worked out so well for them last time….
Whatever CCP tried before they never did in a right way, only extremely half-assed attempts. They can make it work if they would integrate a Planetside 2 type of gameplay into their main EVE game, where you can fight outside of spaceship, on planets and on in-game spacestations, it would be very attractive to people who do not want to fly spaceships. It all depends on whether they want to do it and do it the right way.
This is a bit deceptive because games deceive you pretty cleverly.
The main thing that most games do is actually referred to as “rendering” or “culling” or “phasing” and other similar turns where they basically stop showing new character models after X amount are shown. This is because without this hard limit it would bring your FPS to it’s knees. You can see this old video I found from back in RIFT even.
Even modern games like Planetside 2 handle it this way. For example what they do is if you’re in a tank, they will make some infantry invisible to you and prioritize rendering the other tanks/aircraft/etc. However this leads to you getting sniped by anti-vehicle you can’t even see because they removed the infantry shooting at you. We used to die all the time to invisible bombers because the game decided it was too far and not relevant to us as infantry.
As Bree mentioned it was super prominent in GW2 and a whole meta evolved out of it where you would sneak a Mesmer into a huge enemy ball and portal summon which would then wouldn’t render those models to the enemy and you could largely kill them invisible before you finally loaded in and the enemy could react to you. Eventually they fixed this, and let you load as much as you want but warned you it could be taxing on FPS.
Interestingly BDO does the opposite of this and will load an unlimited amount of people in a radius but then de-prioritize things like trees/NPCs. This is what leads to the ‘pop in’ issue everyone complains about since that happens whether there’s lots of people or not.
Anyone who plays GW2 knows this. The game keeps several invisible targets when there’s a huge ammount of people in the same place. It’s a complete mess.
As a reasonably high tier backer from 7 years ago all I can say is ‘meh’, and that makes me feel really sad.
Not going for a refund, I knew what I might be letting myself in for. I was REALLY looking forward to this but with each passing year I care a little less :(