Unchained Entertainment fka City State Entertainment launched Camelot Unchained prequel Final Stand Ragnarok into its third and final early access earlier this month, kicking off a new rush of curiosity for the future of both games.
This week, FSR’s latest Steam post and newsletter announced the release of the 1.0 build for the game, which includes environment polish for multiple zones, particularly The Towers of Vigrith, which has a new background and sky, as well as health/mana bars, Arena terrain, and updated models for all five current champions and skins.
“In addition to the updates made to each Champion’s model, we’ve implemented several balance changes. This includes updated recharge times for ultimate abilities, ultimates now using mana, and an assortment of other small tweaks,” the studio writes. “Over the course of our development of FSR 1.0 we’ve been working on a number of new systems that should improve a player’s general quality of life. The most major of these are the new Reporting and Muting system, allowing players to address bad actors in-game. If you run into a troublemaker or ne’er-do-well, simply click on their name in the game’s menu in order to report them so we can take care of it. We’ve also improved the UI for better flow and readability, added additional UI info for shielded NPCs (such as Slozas), and various smaller tweaks here and there.”
Unchained says this patch completes the game’s “core content” and that it’s “looking toward expanding it going forward,” with updates that will include the new indoor scenario: the MMO-like Dungeon Maze that we mentioned in our own original preview article.
A top concern from our standpoint right now is that the game hasn’t caught on with players; in the month since launch, FSR hasn’t peaked above 37 concurrent players (that was March 13th, 2024), and as I type this over the weekend, it’s at zero players online. We asked Unchained about the population and marketing; here’s what Mark Jacobs told us:
“UCE has only recently begun its marketing efforts (via sponsored livestreams, ads, media events, etc.) for FS:R. Meanwhile the development team continues building out exciting new content, quality-of-life improvements, and other additions to the core game. Many of these items have been asked for by the streamers as well as our players. Our expectation has always been that given the relatively modest size of our marketing budget, this was going to be a multi-month effort from both development and marketing. Based on the response, both private and public from the livestreamers/players, we are eagerly looking forward to the next few months of updates. We are also continuing to stress test our engine with paid game/stress testing services. These tests will then be turned into publicly facing videos that will be released as the different stages of testing are completed to further prove the power of the Unchained Engine and its applicability to both CU and FS:R. In closing, I’d like to quote what so many of the streamers have said about our engine: ‘That’s a lot of dudes!'”
MOP’s Chris streamed the game earlier in March, finding it fun but hampered by the fact that so few people were online for teaming. A kind MOP viewer joined him for a duo, but it looked pretty challenging with just two people, and indeed the devs have said they’re still working on group scaling. During my own press preview, I thought four or five people seemed like the sweet spot.
