Today is the day: the day when we finally learn what the hell is going on with Camelot Unchained.
MMORPG vets will surely already know some of the backstory here. CU was originally Kickstarted in 2013 as an RvR spiritual successor to Dark Age of Camelot fronted by former Mythic boss Mark Jacobs. It entered beta one back in 2018, with tests putting 3000 humans and bots on a battlefield, but it was bogged down with drama over refunds and the announcement of a second game (Final Stand Ragnarok) using CU’s custom-built engine. In 2024, following more investment into studio Unchained Games (fka City State Entertainment), the team launched Final Stand Ragnarok into early access again and was targeting Camelot Unchained by the end of 2025, with a demo planned for last summer. We didn’t get a demo; instead, at the end of 2024 the studio announced a “temporary suspension of external playtesting” while the team polished up the game, with a promise to show more “early next year,” meaning 2025. But then we learned the studio had laid off nearly half of its devs, presumably the group working on FSR, leading some backers to lose all hope and pose apparent legal threats.
But it’s happening now: Two weeks ago, Mark Jacobs resurfaced and announced this showcase stream, saying backers would be the judge of the “changes, upgrades, and visual improvements that the team has made” with content involving “castles, new environments, and some visuals that [he] hope[s] will surprise you (in a good way).” Backers then received an email inviting them to the stream, which is set for today at 4 p.m. EDT, just a few minutes after this article goes live.
With that backstory out of the way, we’re aiming to watch the stream today alongside you as we finally get a look at how the game has progressed behind closed doors. We’ll be updating this post with the highlights as we go, so refresh!
“The choice I made to go all Willy Wonka was not an easy one,” he says, referring to the drama surrounding going silent last year. Apparently, a few years ago the team had to “make a decision” about the game, and the investors supported finishing FSR and then putting everything into Camelot Unchained. But at the time, Jacobs says there was a lot of skepticism about whether they could deliver Camelot, so what the studio decided to do was “take Camelot Unchained down to the studs” to figure out how to deliver a playable and then great game on a “schedule that made sense.”
“And so we did that,” he says, “and when I say down to the studs, I mean down to the studs.”
Jacobs also addressed the layoffs earlier in the year, saying he didn’t want to let anyone go and nobody deserved that. “Those people helped make what you’re going to see today,” he emphasizes.
In the past, Jacobs says, the team has shown off a bunch of smaller levels but not the “true game” – the gameplay slice that people wanted. The current version of the game is not fully finished but is a first step, with enormous zones that “dwarf” the size of past zones shown for the game, not fully balanced classes for all three realms, and a new lighting solution that is meant to actually “look like something from a modern AAA game.”
That’s pretty much all he says; he then drops a video preview of the game for the public (link is already on the official YouTube). And here you go:
Do note that Jacobs says this is all live footage, in-engine. It shows sweeping views of castles, battlefield scenes, and lots of people fighting and casting. The game’s Discord is calling it Final Stand Camelot, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Finally, Jacobs says that the team will begin letting testers back in shortly – no hard ETA yet though. And that’s it.
Following the stream, Discord is grumpy about, well, everything, with complaints flying about the graphics and no new release window; other folks say the game no longer looks like CU, while still others say they don’t care about graphics as long as it plays like DAOC. A dev has clarified that the game’s crafting system is still happening, saying “crafters are still in the design, though they’re not in yet.”
