Camelot Unchained’s City State Entertainment has posted its monthly newsletter today, and it’s big news indeed: The studio’s just hit 5100 ARCs (autonomous remote clients – its combination of real players and bots simulating real players) in its test. Just a month ago, the company hit 3500 bots and humans on a single battlefield.
As we’ve previously covered, CSE does not actually expect to host this many players in a single battle; the Kickstarter promise was 500, though studio boss Mark Jacobs has intimated he thinks the final count will be somewhere between 1000 and 2000 by launch. The idea here is to push the system as hard as possible in testing to see just how much the game can get away with as the devs add more NPCs, siege engines, and VFX with a lot of people, but without requiring sky-high PC requirements.
The rest of the newsletter is long as usual, with a long entry on what the studio calls “characters 2.0,” an overhaul of the player characters now trickling out to testers; a look at zone design as enhanced by player builders embedded in beta one; and a run-down of updates to the ability builder system, which will ultimately allow players to craft their own skills and spells in-game.
