NirMeleth - Das Eckenforum

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"Mit Mark Jacobs meldet sich jetzt ein MMO-Veteran zurück. Der Executive Producer von Dark Age of Camelot und Mitbegründer von Mythic Entertainment arbeitet mit seinem Team von City State Entertainment an einem neuen MMO mit dem Arbeitstitel "Camelot Unchained". Und das setzt voll auf RvR."
Camelot Unchained – der Spielename lässt langjährige MMO-Fans vermutlich sofort hellhörig werden und an Dark Age of Camelot denken. Und tatsächlich steckt hinter dem heute angekündigten MMO vom Entwicklerstudio City State Entertainment unter anderem Mark Jacobs, Mitbegründer von Mythic Entertainment. Das MMO soll stark auf einem Drei-Fraktionen-System aufbauen. Das RvR soll dabei nicht nur im PvP-Spiel von Bedeutung sein, sondern beispielsweise auch die Wirtschaft beeinflussen, die in Spielerhand liegen soll. Das ganze Spiel soll vom Konflikt der drei Mächte – "Arthurian", "Tuatha Dé Danann" und "Viking" beeinflusst sein.

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Camelot Unchained (Arbeitstitel) soll jedoch kein Nachfolger zu Dark Age of Camelot werden. Das stellte Jacobs in einem Interview mit dem Team von Massively klar. "Ich möchte sehr deutlich machen, dass wir keinen Nachfolger entwickeln. Ich werde nicht versuchen, gegenüber DAoC-Spielern zu behaupten, dass unser neues Projekt alle ihre Wünsche erfüllt. Ihr Vertrauen war mir immer wichtig. Während ich also natürlich möchte, dass Spieler meiner früheren Projekte neugierig werden und sich dieses mit Interesse ansehen, werde ich nicht herumlaufen und behaupten es wäre der »geistige Nachfolger zum besten RvR-MMO aller Zeiten«", so Jacobs, der sich ansonsten mit Details zurückhält.

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Are you on the fence?

We knew that our Kickstarter campaign wasn’t going to be an easy sell. We are asking for $2M which isn’t the largest Kickstarter ask but it is still very significant. Even though I am putting up $2M of my own money (and an additional $1M from investors) to fund completion, we know that many of you are still nervous about committing. If you are among those who are waiting to see if we get closer to funding before committing to our Kickstarter, I have to ask you why? Kickstarter, unlike PayPal, doesn’t charge your credit card until the project funds. Thus, you can back us without worrying about being charged for a project that doesn’t fund. This is why we can’t use PayPal until after Camelot Unchained funds. Also, by pledging now you help us as we pass through the Kickstarter doldrums that very often happen in the middle of a project. I’m hesitant to use any gimmicks (“Pledge now and receive a pony!”) but I will simply say this, if you believe in what you’ve seen so far from Camelot Unchained and have not currently pledged, it’s time to show your support. Doing so costs you nothing and in the meantime, it may help encourage other people to pledge as well. If everyone who signed up for our newsletter pledged now we would be a lot closer to making our goal. So please, if you like what you’ve seen and heard from myself and CSE, now’s the time for getting off that fence before it leaves a permanent mark!

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Project Update #20: Evening Update April 17, 2013

Folks,
Tonight’s update will consist of two live streaming events. The first and biggest event will be Andrew Meggs showing off the latest build of our engine tech, herein and forever known as the “Unchained Engine” because all rendering engines need a proper name! The live stream for it can be viewed here and it will begin at 7:30 PM EST. Andrew has worked his usual magic and our engine now has a particle effects system built in. Enjoy the event and pay close attention to the weapons of both the Tuatha and the Vikings. ☺
Later tonight I will be visiting the OppositionPodcast guys for a little while to talk about Camelot Unchained. It can be heard live here and it begins at 8:30 PM EST.
We've also got two improved pieces of concept art from Michelle and Sandra.The first is a more detailed look at the Path of Souls while the second is of a very special doorway in The Depths. I hope you enjoy them!
Today was a fun day in the studio as we worked on the storyboard for the big update at the end of the week. We also saw a nice increase in our numbers today so let's keep the momentum going! Enjoy the wonders of modern technology this evening and I hope to see some of you in our chat channel later tonight. ☺
Mark

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Piercing the Veil #1

Greetings my dear duckies and welcome to the first Piercing the Veil!!!

Piercing the Veil will be a semi-regular event that we shall host until the game shuts down or until the end of time, whichever comes first! We intend for this Q&A to be both fun and informative. We will answer silly questions right alongside the more serious game-oriented questions. My chief endeavor is to help build an informed and happy player community and PtV is one of the tools that I believe will help me achieve that goal. Keep an eye on the forums for new discussions where you can post questions. Thanks to all of the Founders who took the time to post their questions for this PtV! Renée Machyousky, Community Manager, City State Entertainment

Oakblade Asked: Are there any live Ducks near the office and do you feed them?
You wouldn’t want to feed the ducks around here. These are some severely jaded ducks. They eat a mixture of buffalo chicken wings and asphalt, and they actually experience road rage. We prefer our ducks bright yellow and plastic, with their innocence still intact.

Sornin Asked: Will guilds be able to form formal alliances with other guilds in order to share communications and resources?
Do I blow a cute fuse each and every time I see a baby duck? YES! We absolutely want our players to be able to create formal alliances. I was in a rather small guild in Dark Age of Camelot, and being part of an alliance made for much easier group finding as well as intel and resource sharing. So, if Mark said no to alliances he would have to deal with some pretty epic pouting…from me.

Harvest Asked: Every Class will have different Specs?
Maybe, sorta, kinda, yes and no /dodge! Sorry to be evasive on this one. We have discussed things like: having classes that do one thing very well, or having classes that can be specced multiple ways, as well as having combinations of both. Rest assured that if we went with limited class speccing, we would make up for it by having a greater number of classes than we laid out during the Kickstarter.

Mirelind Asked: Did you get any ideas from this forum that you are going to put into the game?
Mark has said that the Becoming™ tale for the Bean Sidhe was inspired by a couple of questions from the forums. We believe that it’s extremely likely that Founders are going to come up with interesting ideas for us to incorporate over the lifetime of the game. As a matter of fact, Mark has a reward system that we will talk about in a future PtV. Mark would say it is ‘an oldie but a goodie’.

travy Asked: How will up-scaling a pledge work?
Like magic of course! Our programming team is working on this now; we will have actual answers for you at the end of the month when we hope to reopen Paypal with fresh tiers. I like saying ‘fresh tiers’.

Meddyck Asked: Are “Arthurians”, “Tuatha de Dannan”, and “Vikings” the final names for the 3 realms or could those change before release?
These are not yet set in stone! I am on a steady diet of Founders’ thoughts and opinions, and this topic is no exception. I distil down what you folks say into a readily digestible formula for the team to consume (even though many of them are happily active and/or lurking on the forums). Fun Fact: Mark was originally going to use “Sidhe” instead of “Tuatha de Dannan” but he thought “Tuatha de Dannan” just sounded cooler.

Hellraise Asked: Are you planning to organize the forums with structured / moderated questions and topics or are you happy to keep it as it is?
Definitely planning a re-org of the forums. As we say, it’s on the list. We’ve had a lot of feedback asking for a simpler design and once we port over to our own hosting, we will have far greater control over the set-up, mods (the code kind), etc., and we do plan to simplify some. We are also planning to have localized subsections of the forums for our communities that prefer to read/write in languages other than English, provided there is enough interest, and so far there is from at least three non-English reading/writing communities.

Incan Asked: Do you have any idea of what the world will look like?
Many, you should see our dry erase boards here! Ideas are not something this team is lacking. It’s rather like our confection situation actually. There is nothing congealed enough to bite into yet however. As you know, Mark has said that this will be a large world, and while the art team ready the throwing daggers every time he mentions that, we do all agree that we are better off with a map that is maybe a bit too large rather than one that has people feeling crammed in.

Peter kokocha Asked: Have you ever eaten DUCK????
Umm. I umm. You see, what happened was…well, it kinda flew into my mouth… OKAY!? It also just happened to be dead, nicely crisped and covered in an amazing orange demi-glaze. As for the rest of the team, they have informed me that during the Kickstarter, some kind Founders sent over some Peking Duck for lunch. They report that it was yummy!

Phoxx & Fenris Wolf Iron Asked: When will the next 24-hour live stream be?
We are considering having one for the re-launch of Paypal tiers later this Fall! This time we will be prepared, as opposed to the big guy strolling in here and suggesting, “Hey we should stay up for the last 24 hours of the Kickstarter!” At which point everyone wishes they hadn’t stayed up quite so late gaming the night before. I am sure most of you can relate.

Nibs Asked: Will we be able to swap out the music files like we could in DAoC? I loved being able to swap out the 2 default combat musics to my own choices.
We haven’t discussed this before today but I believe that we will give players the ability to do so!

Belatucadros Asked: Mark recently finished a document on the magic system, which he said was then discussed amongst the group at CSE. How much of it survived the group contact? Specifically Andrew, who would be making tech decisions.
Our programming team was so on board with the Magic Systems doc, that they started suggesting embellishments and talked about how it would work, rather than how it couldn’t. They are good at life. We were all excited actually and the whole team had questions and suggestions. It was inspiring! I think Mark was rather pleased with our reaction to his ‘idears’. In all fairness, Mark usually spends a lot of time talking about his system ideas with the team before he works on the design docs, just to get our initial feedback and suggestions.

That's it for this round folks! Thanks again for your participation

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Folks,

It seems like only yesterday our Kickstarter campaign was in full swing. And now here we are, at an important crux point for our game. The opening of Alpha One!

Last weekend, we had a minor setback, and we had to delay the opening of Alpha testing for this game. It’s a shame; we would have loved to make our estimated date, but well, we didn’t quite manage it. OTOH, we kept our promise to you by owning up to the delay, and the reason for it. That is what you, our Backers, have come to expect from us, and always should.

It is still less than 72 hours since we had to announce the delay. And now, as disappointed as I know everyone at CSE was in announcing the delay, we are proud and happy to tell you that as of this writing, the Alpha testing phase of Camelot Unchained™ has begun! Starting tonight, we will begin regularly scheduled tests of our game. We will also have lots of unscheduled tests, when we need/want you folks to jump in and break stuff. On top of that, we’ll have contests, giveaways, prizes, and other non-typical Alpha stuff, as another way to thank our Backers for their support.

If you saw our Live Stream announcement, you’ve heard about C.U.B.E., our Camelot Unchained Building Environment, which is another way we wanted to say thanks to our Backers. For those of you who didn’t see the announcement: All of our Alpha folks will not only be able to play the main game during test times, but will also get a standalone ‘building program’ to test, break, and help expand during the next 18 months. C.U.B.E. isn’t Minecraft™, but I think you’ll be surprised at the functionality it already has, and by its potential for the future.

One of the biggest reasons we made the decision to make C.U.B.E. available like this came down to the amazing support from you folks. Yes, we are giving you a tool that will absolutely help us find bugs, problems, and issues in the building system, and yes, we expect lots of useful feedback from you, but we are also offering C.U.B.E. as a way to say “thank you” to our amazing Community. And judging by the reaction from our IT folks and some of the structures they have already created, we are looking forward to seeing lots of great stuff from our extremely large Alpha community.

So, how’s that? Not only are we opening Alpha, but we are giving you a fun building tool that you can use without having to be in the main game! As long as you can connect to our patcher, you can use C.U.B.E. As an additional bonus, the C.U.B.E. environment is also going to be used to test blueprints, pre-fabs, and yes, even parts of crafting. Testing an MMORPG only when the tests are being run? That’s so 20 years ago.

And for those who wonder about whether I’m getting on the hype train that I promised to avoid? Nope! And I can prove it: this is all working already. C.U.B.E., and the ability to use it in standalone mode, is not coming tomorrow. It is available along with Alpha. So, future builders of the world: you can enjoy building your intricate structures even when our servers are offline for Alpha testing. If you hold Alpha access (or IT access) and our patcher is up (which is almost 24x7—every now and then we need to take it down for something), you can build to your heart’s content!

As per above, it’s been a long road to get here. We have had setbacks, issues, new babies, bad weather, flooding, and many other challenges to deal with, but we are here. We know we have kept one of the promises that we made as we open Alpha testing to our Backers. We are very proud to reach this point, and we are very, very much looking forward to killing seeing you, inside the game.

Before you go into the game though, you must head over to our Forums. Go to the Alpha Forum where you’ll find the instructions to get into the game. It also as a useful, if not finished, manual for Alpha testing. Enjoy!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my partner, co-founder, and most importantly, my friend Andrew Meggs, for starting this studio with me, and weathering all the ups and downs of game development. I’d also like to call out all the people at CSE, without whose hard work and dedication we wouldn’t have reached this point. I’m so very proud of each and every one of you. So, thanks to all of you: Rob Argue, Daniel Beck, James Brown, Mike Crossmire, Bryce Darling, Michelle Davies, Cory Demerau, Patrick Doring, Tonya Dunham, Bull Durham, Brian Green, Jenesee Grey, David Hancock, James Koo, Renee Machyousky, Mike Milano, Tim Mills, Anna Luu, Sandra Pavulaan, Ben Pielstick, Max Porter, Charles Ribemont, Tyler Rockwell, Scott Trolan, and Sascha Zehe.

And again, thanks to all of our Backers for their continued support!

-Mark