Where’s Camelot Unchained?

I was inspired (which I need more of lately) to write today’s topic on the status of Camelot Unchained. My inspiration came from a comment by one of our regular readers who hijacked a post. The comment hijack inspired me to look up a WordPress plugin that would move comments to another post, so thank you doubly for that.

Here’s the comment:

I’m going to hijack this to talk about Camelot unchained, cause, it seems to need some discussing.

We all love mark’s “openess”, but wasn’t the Kickstarter like 3 years ago?

And I, for a few hours, had more than $1k pledged. For beta access and a really cool storm tower or something. Thankfully I came to my senses, and cancelled that. Cause 3 years on there is still no beta, right? And nobody even talks about storm towers. Or personal taverns. Or any of the other crap they were selling.

I think the comment is right that Camelot Unchained needs more discussion. CU is a very, very niche title right now. Like all niche titles, it has a cult following. In this case, those followers are mostly devout backers. They’ve created a very tight community and naturally most of that discussion happens within that community and not within the greater MMOsphere — which actually sucks for all commentary right now, so perhaps that’s okay.

Despite being a backer of somewhere near $200 (I think?), I haven’t followed CU more than skimming the weekly emails. I browse the website every so often to see what’s new. They’re making progress, albeit slow. The CSE team is behind their schedule set out in the Kickstarter, but we all know by now that MMO timelines are mostly meaningless and when they hit their timelines the games aren’t finished anyway.

A couple months ago Mark (CSE President) admits the tone of development was a little more ‘negative’ or ‘serious’ as they hit snags (I think I heard him say that in one of the recent video update streams).  I don’t think that it was ever negative or too serious to the point where I have doubted the game would release. People love to scream, “It’s vaporware at this point!” I don’t see any truth in that.

Beta (or as Mark likes to call it, Bater) is still delayed. It was, at one point, possibly coming as early as “early 2016.” Personally, I don’t care. I’d like a fun game like Camelot Unchained to get ‘it’ right. CU is probably the last chance I will ever give a PvP MMO. So in that respect, I really don’t care if it took another year or two to even reach beta. I wish games would stop promoting beta testing as if it was a promise or should mean anything to players. Let’s get rid of beta as a marketing gimmick, shall we?

As for promised features, I’ve lost track. Again, I’m following the ‘big picture’ ideas behind CU. I’m not following the systems or feature lists anymore. I have no idea how many of the things Mark discussed with me in the past are even true anymore. The game has been growing and changing over the years. Totally okay. Whether or not they ever deliver on the original promises of taverns or building or any of that sorta matters not to me anymore. I’m more interested in a game that meets the big picture and delivers a finished game with good animations and cohesive finished systems.

Mark’s openness and transparency under development has been a much better way of marketing the game. I like it too. I think that at times it’s too niche for the masses, which is fine. I think it would be inappropriate to romanticize the game updates (remember WAR’s overly-produced videos?) and try to get each of them covered on the news sites. Just doing a “sit on a couch with a palm tree covered in Christmas lights” works.

Patience for games to come out was a virtue I used to severely lack. Because of that, I’ had my heart broken by games, my dreams stomped on, and my trust violated so many times that I’m now completely beyond feeling any urgency to rush into them. Give me a completed game that’s fun, true to its big pictures goals, and I’ll be happy.