Here are the highlights from Camelot Unchained’s siege warfare demo and roadmap reveal

He’s posted up the features and tech that the team has been working on. Click to make it bigger to read it.

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.

Now he’s moving on to the Cherry Keep siege test. (If you’ve followed us a long time, you know we’ve covered this before.) Jacobs says the point of Cherry Keep was to create a slice of gameplay that could actually handle 500+ players in a giant battle, as was the Kickstarter promise. Now he’s showing never-before-published video of the May 2019 Cherry Keep stress test, with over 1000 bots and testers besieging the crap out of the player-built keep. It also includes destruction mechanics as the keep is slowly wrecked block by block by the trebuchet, and apparently they could even then get battles up to 3000 without much lossiness. You can also see individual characters, with armor, combat skills, and so forth. “Nobody else can do what we can do,” he says. Hopefully the hi-res video is available later, but here are some (bad) screenshots from the stream for now.

Here’s the destruction.

Now he’s just said that he’s going to run the Cherry Keep siege live and invited all backers (from all tiers) to join to play it. So the current stream is from right now as we type this. He says that the devs have smoothed out a lot of the glitchiness in the ensuing months, and they deliberately made this version of the keep wimpy so that it would be destroyed in a hurry for the demo. They have about 100 actual testers and about 700 bots right now. None of this has ever been shown to the public before. Again, our screenshot is crappy – if you’re not watching live, you can catch the higher-res video afterward.

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.

The test is still ongoing, but while that happens, Jacobs has moved on to the promised roadmap, Camelot-specific (it doesn’t include anything CUBE- or Colossus-specific). In this 90-day plan, they’re working on continuing visual upgrades, a new RvR battleground scenario, scripted events, character ability and art updates, warbands (if I recall right, those are a special type of big group that isn’t a guild), UI adjustments, new class stuff, more lore, and of course engine stuff. He does say people are wrong to downplay the importance of the engine, that it’s critical to everything the team does.

He reminds watchers that they haven’t added more stretch goals to eke more money out of anyone, and says everyone working on the game (and the investors) want the game out, and he gets that, and that if they didn’t care about getting out CU itself, they wouldn’t have spent all this time and money and effort working on it to get it as far as it is – nobody’s giving up on it now. He also apologizes again, saying he thought he’d be able to talk around the naysayers. “We have every intention of making Camelot Unchained the best RvR game that ever came out,” he says, calling it a “passion project” that he aims to finish.

On to Q&A now. I missed two questions, but I got most of them.

• 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.

He’s concluding now, and he apologizes again and then thanks people who vented at him about the way he presented the games last week, that he heard you, but he hopes people have seen what they have now and will stick with them now that they’ve seen how CU is delivering the large-scale siege the KS promised. He says that was “just a taste” of what’s coming for the game.

Video for the stream is now live.