Camelot Unchained, the Supposed Successor of Dark Age of Camelot

[Deleted]

Will it be released in 15 months? I get the feeling the development is rather slow with that game, and 15months feels short but probably also what they kind of need unless they want the game to be dated once it hits. But I really doubt seeing beta around 8 months from now tbh, I hope to be proven wrong though but most mmos gets scrapped these days except for low budget ones that launch here and there, guess you can find some on steam that noone talks about and not many really plays.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Will it be released in 15 months? I get the feeling the development is rather slow with that game, and 15months feels short but probably also what they kind of need unless they want the game to be dated once it hits. But I really doubt seeing beta around 8 months from now tbh, I hope to be proven wrong though but most mmos gets scrapped these days except for low budget ones that launch here and there, guess you can find some on steam that noone talks about and not many really plays.

Hell no; the people who backed this game are in for the long hall. Only recently have we seen major kickstarter/Steam EA games of this scale with everything developed from scratch. Elite Dangerous was in development for over three years and just came out a few months ago; KSP was in development for four years just came out this month. CU absolutely will not be out until at least '17, '18 more likely.

[Deleted]

Hell no; the people who backed this game are in for the long hall. Only recently have we seen major kickstarter/Steam EA games of this scale with everything developed from scratch. Elite Dangerous was in development for over three years and just came out a few months ago; KSP was in development for four years just came out this month. CU absolutely will not be out until at least '17, '18 more likely.

So it doesn't need to be done in 15months then?
And I remember the devs wasn't aiming for being the next BIG one, since they will have subfee and are happy with settling for a minor core of players.
So I guess that unless they have some rush to finish in 15months they can take their time, if they don't aim for a larger playerbase. And who knows, if their timing is right and game is done right they might become a bit bigger. There are not many fantastic mmos currently being developed, so keeping it up might pay off if they are lucky.

[Azrile]

I was never a huge fan of DAoC, but I will say this. Warhammer failed mainly for one reason.. The Warhammer IP demanded there be only 2 factions. One of the reasons DAoC actually worked well for pvp is because the third faction kinda acted like a kingmaker. On most realms, the two smaller factions always ganged up on the largest faction which kept things in check.

In Warhammer, EVERY realm started up being unbalanced for one faction or the other, and players quickly re-rolled onto a server where the faction they wanted to play dominated the other faction. The game was never about endgame PVE, it was about capturing the opponents capital. Because every server was dominated by one faction or the other, capturing the enemy city happened much faster than the devs were anticipating and the conquering side never met any resistance. This resulted in ´endgame´ which was supposed to be these massive battles where you defended your city.. instead, they were simply steamrolling NPCs while the enemy players never bothered to defend. This forced the devs into a non-stop panic mode of trying to slow down city invasions using all types of artificial means.

The devs never reacted fast enough to balance factions on servers, and without that 3rd faction being the kingmaker, by the end of the first month, every server was ´won´ and pvp, the heart of the game, was dead.

Warhammer was a decent game with decent pvp mechanisms and some cool pve features.. but the fact that the entire endgame was ruined by faction imbalanced killed the game before it got out of it´s free month.

RvR games do not work.. you need RvRvR

[Kyanion]

The devs never reacted fast enough to balance factions on servers, and without that 3rd faction being the kingmaker, by the end of the first month, every server was ´won´ and pvp, the heart of the game, was dead.

Warhammer was a decent game with decent pvp mechanisms and some cool pve features.. but the fact that the entire endgame was ruined by faction imbalanced killed the game before it got out of it´s free month.

RvR games do not work.. you need RvRvR

Yeah that was one of the big issues. From what I remember in the month I played we were on one of the servers that was getting DOMINATED by the other side. They'd attack one of our bases with 5 to 6 times our number and steamroll the shit out of us. I remember one single time we caught them offguard and managed to get a base back to buy some PvP gear and then a few mins later it was taken back and we didn't see it again until I stopped playing the game.

Multiple factions is a nice touch to keep the game fresh and potentially introduce politics of one side campaigning to help the other only to betray them at some later date. It is okay to be the underdog if you have the ability to sway the PvP by helping one of the other sides. But when it is 2 factions only the PvP can get VERY stale on most realms.

[torment3d]

I never said they didn't have good ideas. In fact they had great ideas. The problem was the sloppy execution and the lack of commitment. I was one of those guys who didn't get his class at launch, since some classes got delayed and I rolled a bright wizard. Do you remember what two bright wizards could do to an enemy raid back then?

The point is Warhammer was shut down because it was shit and it was shit because the developers chose to lie through that fat bastard Paul, by assuring us everything was going perfect and everything was gonna be in a perfect state. It was shit because they focused way too much on RVR and left everything else in the shithouse. And it was shit because it attracted a type of player - the enraged fanboy - who had a nervous breakdown every time someone would point out a problem with the game and the worse part is that the developers listened to those people and now Jacobs seems to be doing the same cause they send him asskiss greeting cards.

I was in <All or Nothing> on Dark Crag. We captured a fort defended by at least 3-4 Order wbs with a 2x sorc/2x dok/2x chosen party just cycling Sprout Carapace and 1,001 Dark Blessings which meant we had two literally invincible sorcs that bombed out the whole building in under a minute. It was at that point that I realized balance would need to be retouched upon...

[Kyanion]

Just seems like the vocal minority hardcore fanboys will bang the drums on their forums, throw money at them but when it comes time to release the game there just isn't as many people as you'd expect. And then you run into retaining the people who AREN'T hardcore fanboys and it becomes even harder to keep them.

You have to be careful what you do and how you respond to the 'fans'. Warhammer never learned a damn thing about how to do it and many other games take pages from the same shitty book and then they are shocked when the game dies or goes to a shitty F2P model. I mean there are many spots you can look at in various games were they put in sweeping 'nerfs' to many classes/abilities which just make the casuals leave. D3 had it happen, Rift had it happen and many other games down the line did such things. You have to have the game as polished as possible for release and then not over-react to things with huge nerfs. One way to smartly nerf is to buff other things to catch up to the powerful classes/abilities.

Anyways, this game is a long ways off and so far nothing I've seen has given me much hope for the game. Maybe it'll prove me wrong and I'd be fine with that, I could use more MMOs to play.

[Evilfish]

Hell no; the people who backed this game are in for the long hall. Only recently have we seen major kickstarter/Steam EA games of this scale with everything developed from scratch. Elite Dangerous was in development for over three years and just came out a few months ago; KSP was in development for four years just came out this month. CU absolutely will not be out until at least '17, '18 more likely.

Then they lied.

Because the game has been in development since May 2013, or at least the Kickstarter campaign started then and it was supposed to come out in June 2016. So not even 15 months to go.

Not to mention that they already delayed the alpha.

[Deleted]

That's the problem I have with these Kickstarter games, they take way too slow to develop. I just don't think MMOs are a suitable game genre for crowdfunding.

Kickstarters do not take more than regular games.
The point is that when you see a game made through a normal business model you usually start seeing it that is already in production, engine is maybe shitty and unoptimized but done.

With kickstarter you get show the game in a stage so early that is almost pre-production, so if you want to back them you need to know that the project is way behind in production than other games, it "seems" longer only because they usually get presented to the public way earlier than other games that have big bucks behind.

Kickstarter is basically the process of the devs going to the publisher and say "so we want to do this, and this is an superearlydemo" that players do not usually see. Only that instead of going to the publisher they're asking players.

Not saying that it may happen for them to take longer, cause some of them are made by new devs for which that may be their first professional project. Then you have Molyneux... then you have people like Obsidian that took what it was a very reasonable amount of time.

[Froggy]

1. DAOC had the best PvP system I've ever experienced in an MMO.

2. Warhammer wasn't horrible to me. Not amazing, but still had some cool things.

3. Camelot Unchained is something that interests me. I love how just like DAOC each of the 3 realms will have unique races/classes. I have no intention to contribute money to the project before it's released. However, I will most likely pick the game up on launch day.

[Drakain]

But.... Warhammer

[stellvia]

The devs never reacted fast enough to balance factions on servers, and without that 3rd faction being the kingmaker, by the end of the first month, every server was ´won´ and pvp, the heart of the game, was dead.

Warhammer was a decent game with decent pvp mechanisms and some cool pve features.. but the fact that the entire endgame was ruined by faction imbalanced...

Sounds just like DAOC, honestly. Jacobs has some interesting ideas (Imperium also sounded interesting), but he's absolutely horrible at balance. DAOC was a series of horrible imbalances that were allowed to fester for months or years. Never truly fixed, merely a bandaid put on top of other bandaids. Tweaked via spreadsheet balancing towards whatever the majority subscribers/whiners wanted. Midgard's aoe mez at release? Berserkers? Albion getting 3 stealth classes (of which one was their runspeed class too)? Infiltrators the only class with a 9 second stun AND it was a frontal arc move after evasion for the highest evasion class in the game? Spiritmaster being able to have their pet take from-stealth attacks for them, even when standing 20yds from the pet? And later also given an RA to buff the pet to L80 for a minute and curbstomp their supposed counter-class? Etc. Etc.

It would be nice if this were to be good, but he has 2 strikes against him, so atm I don't have faith in the same exact things being wrong with this as well. I'll wait and see.

[Evilfish]

Sounds just like DAOC, honestly. Jacobs has some interesting ideas (Imperium also sounded interesting), but he's absolutely horrible at balance. DAOC was a series of horrible imbalances that were allowed to fester for months or years. Never truly fixed, merely a bandaid put on top of other bandaids. Tweaked via spreadsheet balancing towards whatever the majority subscribers/whiners wanted. Midgard's aoe mez at release? Berserkers? Albion getting 3 stealth classes (of which one was their runspeed class too)? Infiltrators the only class with a 9 second stun AND it was a frontal arc move after evasion for the highest evasion class in the game? Spiritmaster being able to have their pet take from-stealth attacks for them, even when standing 20yds from the pet? And later also given an RA to buff the pet to L80 for a minute and curbstomp their supposed counter-class? Etc. Etc.

It would be nice if this were to be good, but he has 2 strikes against him, so atm I don't have faith in the same exact things being wrong with this as well. I'll wait and see.

Please don't misunderstand, I'm not defending the DAOC imbalance which was pretty obvious to anyone that played that game for over a month, but DAOC was a good game, overall, and that is why it was easier to live with those imbalances.
But in Warhammer Online a game that had the attention of the whole world with extreme ambitions such as killing the shit out of WoW and while they never said they wanted to conquer WOW, they never denied it either, as far as I know, when the fuckshit fanboys were jizzing in their pants while talking about how Warhammer is going to dominate WOW and that fatso Paul was smirking under his gross, greasy mustache.

I am honestly convinced that the developers are unable to take criticism, constructive or otherwise. The Warhammer beta was filled with asskissing fanboys who were ready to eat an entire plate of crap if the devs served them that. You think there weren't people pointing out the issues the game still had? There were, but they were being buried under the torrent of fanboy insults and slander, calling them "WoW Mercenaries" or telling them "This isn't WOW" I shit you not, I was there, I remember how fucking stupid these people were. WoW mercenaries? Because they do the fucking job they were brought in to do? And the constant reminder that Warhammer wasn't WOW. Yeah, ok, it wasn't but when these fucking people stopped talking about how Warhammer isn't WOW they'd were talking about how Warhammer was gonna destroy WoW. See a problem there? Well, it does not matter because in less than 3 months the fanboyz and the shit game drove a large chunk of players away.

Anyway, the point is I am unsure about Camelot Unchained, I tried to access their forums but I wasn't able to so I stopped trying. The point is this will not be another DAOC where people will be more forgiving. And if they think they are gonna mitigate any losses by catering to the fanboys, the types of idiots I mentioned above, then I suspect they are sorely wrong. And I am honestly sorry to find out Camelot Unchained ended up like Warhammer because I believe Jacobs has good ideas, but he loses himself in the fanboy ass-kissing and he is unable to take criticism. I guess he hasn't learned that none of those matter in the end and he's content with repeating the same mistake over again but at a smaller scale.

[Kyanion]

Yeah the WORST thing that these people can do is listen to the vocal minority fanboys and the ass they kiss. I mean good lord go look at the Star Wars forums right before that game got released and for a few months after. That was some of the most toxic shit I've ever seen. And again I stress it is a vocal MINORITY of the playerbase. All those people did was piss people off and drive away paying customers and they had free reign of the forums. If you empower the vocal minority that is some of the most die hard/trolly/assholish people around then you get what you are asking for.

The more I hear about the people behind this game and the type of people defending it on their forums the further I get away from even trying this game on release.

[Azrile]

Sounds just like DAOC, honestly. Jacobs has some interesting ideas (Imperium also sounded interesting), but he's absolutely horrible at balance. DAOC was a series of horrible imbalances that were allowed to fester for months or years. Never truly fixed, merely a bandaid put on top of other bandaids. Tweaked via spreadsheet balancing towards whatever the majority subscribers/whiners wanted. Midgard's aoe mez at release? Berserkers? Albion getting 3 stealth classes (of which one was their runspeed class too)? Infiltrators the only class with a 9 second stun AND it was a frontal arc move after evasion for the highest evasion class in the game? Spiritmaster being able to have their pet take from-stealth attacks for them, even when standing 20yds from the pet? And later also given an RA to buff the pet to L80 for a minute and curbstomp their supposed counter-class? Etc. Etc.

It would be nice if this were to be good, but he has 2 strikes against him, so atm I don't have faith in the same exact things being wrong with this as well. I'll wait and see.

Sorry, we aren´t talking about the same thing. I am talking about pure number of players in each realm. Yes, any pvp game, especially ones that allow unique classes per faction are going to have balancing issues. But what I meant is that on Warhammer Realm A had 3000 players and Realm B had 1000 player and the entire endgame was about huge pvp battles.... and the faction imbalances just made it impossible for Realm B to win. In DAoC, Realm A had 3000 players, Realm B had 2000 players and Realm C had 1500 players.. so on almost every server, Realm B and C would ally against Realm A... And if Realm B started to win, Realm C would start working with Realm A... so on most servers, the smallest realm (Realm C) ended up being the kingmaker.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah the WORST thing that these people can do is listen to the vocal minority fanboys and the ass they kiss. I mean good lord go look at the Star Wars forums right before that game got released and for a few months after. That was some of the most toxic shit I've ever seen. And again I stress it is a vocal MINORITY of the playerbase. All those people did was piss people off and drive away paying customers and they had free reign of the forums. If you empower the vocal minority that is some of the most die hard/trolly/assholish people around then you get what you are asking for.

The more I hear about the people behind this game and the type of people defending it on their forums the further I get away from even trying this game on release.

I am going to say something horrible here... player feedback pre-launch of a game, or for features that aren´t live yet in a live game, is usually worthless. Let me give you a typical scenario of how development works.

Step 1. An initial meeting with the devs to design a new feature. The feature is discussed with different people giving their ideas. A few people play devil´s advocate and try to break the feature. The devs have a firm grip of how this system will interact with other systems.. they debate it for a few hours

Step 2. A week later - The devs talk about the feature again, things people thought about over the past week are introduced and new concerns are vetted. A lot of devs will have new thoughts on the feature after having a week to stew over it. A general plan is put into place and someone is assigned to start protoyping the feature with all the nuances

Step 3. After significant pogress is made on the proto-type, the devs again squeeze the idea of the feature and give feedback on it´s ultimate execution. Once you see how it is going to actually interact with the rest of the game, more concerns are brought up and the prototype is tweaked.

Step 4. Announce initial plans to the fans.

Step 5. Within 2 minutes of announcing it, hundreds of posts flood the thread, most of them from people who are obviously way back at Step 1 AND without full knowledge of other features it will interact with. While some players may be able to take time to actually read the feature and put it in full context of the whole game and give feedback, their posts will be swallowed alive by the thousands of other posts from the first group who keep coming back defending their kneejerk reaction after spending 1 minute reading the feature. After weeks, the thread will degenerate down to talking about what-if and what-they-should-do crap.

Not only do you have fans flooding the forums with knee-jerk opinions after barely skimming the feature, players in general will always want to make the game easier and more efficient. As much as you want to wave a magic wand and say it isn´t so... games need time-sinks, games need obstacles. games need limits. If players had their way, there would be portals from quest givers to quest objectives, 250 slot inventory bags, and no mobs that don´t drop purples in the game.

[Evilfish]

Not only do you have fans flooding the forums with knee-jerk opinions after barely skimming the feature, players in general will always want to make the game easier and more efficient. As much as you want to wave a magic wand and say it isn´t so... games need time-sinks, games need obstacles. games need limits. If players had their way, there would be portals from quest givers to quest objectives, 250 slot inventory bags, and no mobs that don´t drop purples in the game.

There's no need for a magic wand to say it isn't so, because it isn't so. While there are people who want some of the things you described, you are pushing towards the ridiculous already talking about people unable to process the concept of a game, especially an online game.
But it is in sync with the opinion of the hardcores who think that the rest of the world is looking for the proverbial easy mode.

So no, sane people don't have unrealistic expectation, that is bullshit made up by ass licking fanboys to sate their anger.

A developer should heed both pro and con comments because both migh offer a new insight, a different perspective, even if they don't end up changing the feature in question. The thing they should be wary is those posts that always agree with them no matter what. Those ... people that go to extremes to make sure the devs are not "upset" or "bothered" because that's how their minds function, they are mentally ill.

[Azrile]

There's no need for a magic wand to say it isn't so, because it isn't so. While there are people who want some of the things you described, you are pushing towards the ridiculous already talking about people unable to process the concept of a game, especially an online game.
But it is in sync with the opinion of the hardcores who think that the rest of the world is looking for the proverbial easy mode.

For me, I am just thinking more of developer or CM time spent sifting through the noise. The noise2gold ratio on a feature that has not yet been put into testing is too high for the feedback to be useful. Developers, especially a team of experienced developers should be able to get the features and design mostly right and should only need feedback after it is testable by players. Players should be giving feedback on what they are actually playing.

[Evilfish]

For me, I am just thinking more of developer or CM time spent sifting through the noise. The noise2gold ratio on a feature that has not yet been put into testing is too high for the feedback to be useful. Developers, especially a team of experienced developers should be able to get the features and design mostly right and should only need feedback after it is testable by players. Players should be giving feedback on what they are actually playing.

The noise? Access to the forums is restricted for those that refuse to pay for their product. And I mean total access. So they don't have to shift through much I expect.

[stellvia]

I am going to say something horrible here... player feedback pre-launch of a game, or for features that aren´t live yet in a live game, is usually worthless. Let me give you a typical scenario of how development works.

Usually the case, but not always. You can often have outlier use-cases pointed out that you never would have considered on your own.

And on a slightly related note: There are sometimes things that hit live that even 30secs-5mins spent with them prove them to be broken/grossly overpowered/whatever other problem, and you're left wondering how the devs didn't notice. They drew it up, sat down at meetings to discuss it and decided on it, and what they decided on was just flat-out idiotic.

[JamesGoblin]

"Successor of DAoC", well it's more like DAoC meets Minecraft on steroids:



If you don't want to go through the whole video, this is a kind of quick summary - https://ello.co/jamesgoblin/post/lwcc9qkee_5xilkhpqhjma